POP
Paste Rating: 91/100 Having spent 2008 opening for Radiohead, appearing on late night TV shows and sharing stages with Paul Simon, Grizzly Bear was suddenly so ubiquitous that it was easy to forget that they didn't even have a new album to promote.
Yet even while on stage, they were perfecting the material that would comprise their third full-length release, and Veckatimest sounds like the final product of a meticulous and exacting evolutionary process—one that has added depth and color to their swooning chamber pop arrangements, crispness to their intricate rhythms and intensity to their careful performances. Their group mind pulsating in unison, the scrappy Brooklyn quartet has never created songs more wistfully plaintive than the gorgeously swaying "Two Weeks," more pristinely longing than the spectral "Dory" or more haunting than the darkly lunging "I Live with You."
But underneath the orchestral flourishes and children's choirs, beneath even the frequent textural shifts and melodic detours, are a set of melodies that find new ways to cut straight to the listener every time.
