What kind of music is grizzly bear

The stereotype was always a stretch: Grizzly Bear were a little too anomalous to stand for something larger than themselves. Coffman left the band after she and Longstreth broke up; earlier this year, he released an uncomfortably intimate album about it. Painted Ruins , their fifth full-length, is the punchiest record Grizzly Bear have ever made.

A gift. Taylor admitted that, in a band this interested in excess, a crucial part of songwriting is removing the inessential. My only qualm with Painted Ruins , though, is that I sometimes miss those moments of simplicity and pause—even boredom. Veckatimest , their breakthrough, remains my favorite Grizzly Bear album not because every song was a highlight, but because of how it was paced. Still, the moments when Grizzly Bear manage to find their balance amount to some of loveliest rock music being made today.

Dave and Chris welcome back chef Diep Tran to celebrate the treasured elixir that is Red Boat Fish Sauce before embarking on a whirlwind survey of their all-time favorite potluck play—Vietnamese summer rolls. Plus David and Kaz open the show discussing the beef between Lince Dorado and the father of superfan Izzy. Growing from humble roots into one of the most acclaimed indie rock acts of the s and s, Grizzly Bear began as the home recording project of Boston-bred singer Edward Droste.

Holed up in his Brooklyn apartment, he laid the groundwork for the band's otherworldly debut album on a small hand-held tape recorder. His homespun effort took on new life with the help of multi-instrumentalist Christopher Bear , a Chicago native who had worked in musical projects ranging from laptop electronica to free jazz.

Bear added instrumentation and vocals to Droste 's sonic blueprints, resulting in 's Horn of Plenty. The band's first tours featured improvisations of Droste 's early songs; later, they developed new material together, and Rossen began contributing songs of his own.

In , Grizzly Bear retreated to Cape Cod to record their first album as a quartet, Yellow House -- a tapestry of multi-layered harmonies, guitars, woodwinds, and electronics set to Droste 's and Rossen 's songs.

Warp released the album in September of The album was a resounding success, debuting at number eight on the Billboard and making the band a ubiquitous entry on year-end lists. Following this flurry of activity, Grizzly Bear went on hiatus. They reconvened in to begin work on their fourth album, but most of the tracks they recorded in Marfa, Texas were discarded. The group started fresh in , returning to where they recorded Yellow House and taking a more collaborative songwriting approach.

A decade ago, a thousand potential Grizzly Bears are born, in apartments and basements across Brooklyn. And one or two of them, perhaps, are naturally adapted to wind up someplace like Radio City. They were slow, spare, and simple, and the way he recorded them—blanketed in muzzy room sounds, noise and reverberation, layers of harmony—gave them a blurry, magical quality, as though he were conjuring them out of ether but could only get portions to fully gel. When he finally shared them with friends, one connected him with Bear, who helped with production and added a few parts.

As of , though, it had social currency behind it. For a few years, indie tastes and rhetoric had pulled toward brash, energetic, danceable sounds—sneery synth-pop in New York clubs, ambitious post-punk acts crossing over toward the mainstream. First, though, Grizzly Bear would play shows. And Droste was not a performer. The whole thing was not meant to be public. And in our late teenage years we all tried to forget it.

Instead of plowing loosely through material the way a rock band might, they seemed to carefully coax each song into being. The sense of conjuring remains. But nobody was calling them that anymore; the album was received as more or less sui generis.

Veckatimest, accordingly, is more crystalline and carefully shaped, very much written, not conjured. At some point it becomes a tangle: A song on Shields I assumed was heavily Droste-driven turns out to have passed back and forth between members several times, with Rossen providing what had seemed like the Droste-iest part.

Take Shields, which seems to have been a stressful record to make. After years of nonstop momentum—recording two albums and side projects and touring constantly—the band took a six-month break.

Rossen recorded a solo EP, wandered upstate New York, and got a bit ruminative about being a musician. Like I guess my ideas are just really old? Very mid-aughts now? But even still, you just keep going and work. When it clicks, it clicks. After more time off to work on songs, they regrouped in Cape Cod and spent three months working. Pare it down, see if we can do that. Just sit on the couch, play chords, and see where it goes, try not to take it too seriously.