This will be one-and-a-half reviews instead of just one. When I began listening to Veckatimest, I was disappointed. I thought, "This is not good. I can't pay attention. Why was I so in love with Yellow House?" Something must have changed between Grizzly Bear's 2006 album and this one. After a spending a long time trying to crack Veckatimest, I went back to Yellow House, gave it a listen, and discovered something strange. Listening again to Yellow House taught me how to listen to Veckatimest.To my ears, Yellow House is a passive experience that paints the world around you. I once described it as the kind of record that a band of ghosts might record in a haunted cabin in the mountains. Maybe it's due to the natural reverberations of that eponymous yellow house in which the album was recorded. Walking down the sidewalk or puttering around your home with Yellow House in your earbuds, your life takes on an ethereal quality and time slows down. The rhythm of the music becomes the rhythm for your day. Even grocery shopping is manageable with Yellow House in your ears.
For some reason, listening to Veckatimest doesn't immediately take me to the same place. I thought that it was the lack of ghostly reverb that was so present in my remembrance of Yellow House. But no, Yellow House is actually much dryer than I remembered. I thought that it was the lack of melodic hooks. But no, Yellow House actually doesn't have a great number of hooks and Veckatimest has quite a few when you break it down (in "Two Weeks," of course, but also in less poppy ditties like "Foreground," "Fine for Now," and "While You Wait for the Others").
Here's what it comes down to: in Veckatimest, the vocals are much more present and forward in the mix. Instead of lilting with the music, the vocals crisply demand your attention. This make it very difficult for the album to become the passive companion that made Yellow House such a winner for me. All the instrumentation in Veckatimest, in fact, has a dry and crisp quality that draws attention away from the sum of its parts (that is, the song itself). The element of Yellow House that I missed in Veckatimest was not its ghostliness, but its very subtle achievement in blending the band together and, in turn, delivering a unified and unassuming product.
If I had not been able to draw on my memory of Yellow House, I might have written off the whole album except for "Two Weeks," the one standout track. As it is, I'm granted the patience to learn to appreciate the shocking dynamics in "Southern Point," the pounding exuberance of "I Live With You," the shimmering keyboard pulse in "Ready, Able," and so on for just about every track. These elements make for delightful songs, but only on repeated listens. I think I finally came around after the 7th time.
As per usual, the lyrics are mostly indecipherable on casual listening, and are only slightly more comprehensible on paper. But there are gorgeous nuggets that welcome wild, imaginative interpretation. Take, for example, the provocative refrain of "Cheerleader": "I'm shooting them myself / I should've made it matter." It recalls the band's earlier fantastic recording of the gender-bending Phil Spector-era song,"He Hit Me." And, also per usual, a fascinating dark undercurrent of violence is the mark of the most memorable lyrical moments on the album. For example: "Dory:" "We'll drop her down / like she's nothing / and the water is all."
Grizzly Bear is a band with high ambition and formidable compositional chops. Veckatimest, moreso than Yellow House, is not a pop album. At the same time, it's not an atmospheric album that allows for passive listening. It demands a particular state of attention and the patience of multiple listens to be a solid winner. Is it worth it? That depends on you and your busy schedule.
