Friday, May 15, 2009

"Grizzly Bear, a four-piece band from Brooklyn, arranges its songs so carefully that they accrue intricate, hairline detail with no loss of momentum, but the group’s most obvious gift is the vocals—all four members sing, and well . . . 'Two Weeks' is a big fat ice-cream cone of a song. The piano part sounds a little like 'Chopsticks' expanded into something more robust, with [drummer Chris] Bear merging a shuffle and a straightforward backbeat as the boys sing 'Oh-ooh-oh' up into the air—a doo-wop quartet launching into orbit. [Ed] Droste sings about a 'routine malaise' but pledges, 'I told you I would stay.' The voices rise higher, as though the song were making itself giddy, and Droste follows his promise with a plea for what Mary J. Blige called 'no more drama': 'Would you always, maybe sometimes, make it easy? Take your time.' It’s an awfully sweet way of telling someone to calm the hell down."
- Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker

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