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“ Sleeping Ute” (referring, apparently, to the Native American tribe, rather than, say, Ute Lemper), by contrast, is storm-tossed, wave-wracked, with no direction home.ĭaniel Rossen has long been the wild card in the band – studious jazz grad, Van Dyke Parks devotee and one of the few genuinely distinctive guitarists of the 21st Century if Grizzly Bear are the long-wished-for American Radiohead, then he is their Jonny Greenwood. From its first lines Veckatimest set course for “a safe haven on the southern point” – a clement, mellifluous idyll where lovers might “swim around like two dories in the bay”.
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Since their debut in 2004, when the band was essentially the solo project of Ed Droste, through the four-piece debut of 2006’s Yellow House, to the full flowering of Veckatimest, without recourse to conceptual gimmicks or radical realignments, with each album the band has somehow undergone a remarkable sea change.Ĭertainly nothing in the band’s back catalogue quite prepares you for “Sleeping Ute”, Shields’ opening track. Yet, for its first half at least, Shields turns out to be exactly that. You would certainly have got have long odds on these diligent craftsmen of cosmic chamber jazz returning with the most thrilling follow-up of the class of ’09. Named after an uninhabited Massachusetts island, as though invoking some Gatsbian vision of the unspoiled “fresh, green breast of the New World”, Veckatimest seemed an attempt to re-imagine Americana, chart the still-unmapped interior of a continent only glimpsed in the work of Van Dyke Parks, Arthur Russell and, well, America. But while their contemporaries chanted ecstatic, synthetic psychedelic reels or performed brainbending marriages of west African guitar and R&B beats, by comparison Grizzly Bear seemed positively traditional.
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Released in the spring of 2009, a few months after Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, a couple of weeks before Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca, Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest was one of the brightest lights in the astonishing efflorescence of US indie at the turn of the decade.