Grizzly Bear: Painted Ruins Review

Vekatimest was a huge breakthrough for a band that already was catching the attention of the indie crowd. If anyone could take the indie crown from Vampire Weekend, it was, and to this day should be, Grizzly Bear. Following that with Shields further cemented their status as the best band currently active for this reviewer. More sprawling grandiose landscapes as songs to sink your teeth into. And now? I'll be upfront: this is yet another jaw-dropping, mind wrinkling, perfect album--and it's only grown on me since I originally came to that conclusion years ago.

There are some new tricks employed here that haven't seen a lot of daylight since their first album Horn of Plenty and the Department of Eagles side project The Cold Nose, both of which showed a lot of ineptitude in the musicians. By no means has the group been averse to using electronic equipment after these (in my opinion) flops, but they've since used them in the way a bemused grandchild would admire their grandparents' childhood robot toy. Everything about the band since Yellow House has had that time capsule feel to it. So it's a step out of their comfort zone to hear references to modern trucks and drumlines in the one-two leadoffs Wasted Acres and Morning Sound. Similarly, Three Rings utilizes loops, echoing, and I'm fairly sure there's some fake drums in there.

Nobody is going to mistake Grizzly Bear for an actual electronic/trance group, just like nobody really mistakes Radiohead, Bon Iver, or Alt-J for an electronic/trance group. Despite all the inspirations, this still feels almost upholstered; it's not really a swan, it's just a stuffed animal. The drum loops don't sound fake, and sometimes they even sound like a real drummer trying to sound looped. Whenever they lean into the synths, keyboards, etc, they end up sounding like Grizzly Bear, instead of Grizzly Bear sounding like electronic music.

There's heavy inspiration from the past as well, from thunky rubbery basslines to muddy stuffy organ punches. It's almost impressive that Danger Mouse isn't involved somehow. Oohs and aahs spreading just a bit too widely in fragile beauty. Dense textures and roaming songcraft. The most twisted-tapestry guitar solos you've ever heard. Everything is so lush you want to run your toes through it, and everything that isn't lush is shimmering.

I don't think it was particularly a choice to stick to the nonuniform song structure--at this point it's just how they write music. There's still themes that come and go to continue tying what you're hearing together, but there's a lot of traveling within each song. Personally, I'm a fan of this kind of work. There's a grandness to this type of presentation you can't get from having to embellish one hook into 3 minutes. They do still have some crutches to lean on--there's quite a lot of crescendos going on, but I never got tired of the zeal in the music, nor the calmness in the vocals.

I've always placed little importance on the specifics of the lyrics in Grizzly Bear albums, but that doesn't mean they don't have something to say. They set the mood as much as the music and the vocalizations do. There's a little more emphasis on stream of consciousness lyrics here than on their previous two efforts, and that only deepens my position on them. I don't have a problem with that, but I also won't tell people how insightful they are vs something like Vampire Weekend or Fleet Foxes. The vagueness must be intentional, and you gain about as much as you lose with this approach. 

When the album does surface its thoughts, they're again the type of fare you expect. Neighbors is quite depressing in that "let the woods compost me" way, and Cut-Out is appropriately sharp-tongued. Losing All Sense a few tracks earlier is admonishing of an....abuse of some sort? It's a little in the middle of clear and vague. This is often at odds with the generally gorgeous music behind these painful whims, giving the songs a sense of acceptance...or maybe just catharsis. Sometimes it's hard to tell which of those is better for you in the end, and it's easy to headcannon this intent into the musicians.

I've never been all that keen on the early stuff from the band, feeling that they grasped their sound via the very same side project I bemoaned earlier. If they hadn't worked through those LPs, though, these last 3 albums wouldn't be anywhere close to what they are. Normally, 3 albums this similar would be a warning of a stuck band, slowly getting worse while ensuring a mid-career switch will kill them for good. Grizzly Bear was never stuck; they wrote a trilogy of albums because there was that much good music to make. If we never get another album from them, and there's reason to believe this is true, I won't complain. Grizzly Bear didn't rob me of another great album; Grizzly Bear released 3 achingly perfect albums in a row. Nobody should ever expect more than that. All I can do is rent a cabin in the woods, sit in the sunroom, and close my eyes as I play them over and over again in perfect contentment.

10/10, Vinylworthy