But whatever the reason, we’ve gotten to a place where albums have Frankensteinian titles like Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded - The Re-Up, and the extra, wait-wait-there’s-more material on these revamps often feels obligatory, forced, and better off back in the vault. Blame the ever-accelerating nostalgia cycle, the desperate marketing tactics of a wheezing industry, or the everyone-on-the-team-gets-a-trophy mentality of our youth probably just blame all three. These days it’s easy to feel skeptical about words like “deluxe,” “expanded,” “rebooted,” or any other focus-grouped synonym-particularly when they’re attached to the name of a record you could have sworn came out a few months ago. It’s an album to take your breath away at certain points, with plenty of beauty that makes the whole journey more than worthwhile.The Special Edition is no longer special. With this effort, GRIZZLY BEAR are now always many steps beyond their beginnings as a home-recording project for singer Ed Droste. With considerably more care taken on lyrics, Shields is far from containing only dreamy pop compositions that the band had constructed on previous albums. By the time it calms down, the album blends all its gentle and majestically blustering sides in the seven-minute stunner Sun in Your Eyes. However, Shields also has the dignity of becoming all frugal and quiet – especially in The Hunt and What’s Wrong, both of which drift into airy minimalism. The denial of simplification can be found in the rest of the songs, which comprise obscure jazz harmonies, changeable meters and structures that can change in any direction, always depending on the diverse moods and melodies, as well. In songs like Yet Again and Half Gate, the compromise between experimentation and elegance creates catchy and melodic pop tunes without being simple at any point. The lyrics “I live to see your face, and I hate to see you go / but I know no other way than straight on out the door,” reveal the manifoldness of emotions, diverging into different directions all at the same time. It’s emotionally intense.”įor instance, take Sleeping Ute, Shields’ opener, as only one of the many eventful songs – staggering, swirling, deafening, unraveling, and shimmering with the acoustic guitar – that are dramatic from the beginning to the end! With its abundant embellishments and eccentric psychedelic moments, the song could be the perfect soundtrack of a typical Quentin Tarantino movie. Rossen added: “This album doesn’t feel like a depressing record. Droste picked up the thought: “There’s a desire to be autonomous, but there’s also this great fear of being alone, and there’s this constant feeling of, ‘How do you reconcile this?’ There’s this need for space, but there’s also this, ‘Come closer come closer.’ ” And Mr. It just feels like a major difficulty in life.” Mr. “We were dealing with that in various forms, learning what it means to be alone, learning what it means to be close to somebody, certain things coming to a head. “There’s a lot of talk about negotiating distance from people in your life,” Mr. It was when the songs slowly emerged that the band became aware of a recurring theme in the lyrics. On their new output, complex song compositions – musically as well as verbally – are concerned with the enigmas of human relationships. Once he pulled together a band in 2005, including a second main songwriter, Daniel Rossen, GRIZZLY BEAR’s music and audience gradually expanded.Įmploying traditional and electronic instruments, the band creates soundscapes reaching from psychedelic pop over folk rock to experimental, thereby being dominated by the use of vocal harmonies.
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Droste released Horn of Plenty, an album of songs recorded largely in his bedroom, as a one-man group in 2004.
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Undoubtedly, this fourth album of the Brooklyn-based indie-rock ensemble around Edward Droste marks another milestone in their steadily ascending career ever since Mr.