Being on the Outer Banks in November or December presents a hermetic world, a sphere where memory and deep solitude are encapsulated, the spray from a grey and windblown sea acting as flakes for this microcosmic snowglobe, the cold, breaking water the Outside World beyond the thin ribbon of sand. The hand that shakes the world every so often is that thick, humid, cold southwest wind, a once-warm Gulf Stream breeze chilled by the Pamlico Sound, the salt content reduced but still piquant in the nose. There is a grit in the breeze, perhaps fine sand or crystallized salt, or just the needling of remembering pin-pricking the cheeks as the wind sweeps over and down the dunes, disappearing into the foam and gun-metal-grey clouds, the horizon at some hours an indistinct ash color. There is a loneliness, but a comfortable loneliness. There is a blustery world afoot, but softened by the safe distance from the water and a sturdy coat. Only the face is vulnerable, but the head can always be turned in the other direction to avoid direct confrontation with the elements. Peering into the junction of sky and water sets the mind into a well-controlled nuclear reaction, one thought engendering another begetting another developing another until the end-product of remembering, re-imagining, and re-romanticizing a subject arises, with the rest of the world of thought safely contained by the skull, the most important control rod of the human race.
Or, this is what happened about the eighth time I listened to Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest all the way through, which came around 3 in the morning several days ago. This is a review long overdue, perhaps; my knowledge of this band is limited aside from The Yellow House, which was an offering I could have taken or left as it became something that played into the Brooklyn-cum-Montreal world of prep-school indie. Veckatimest may very well be the best album I have heard this year, musically speaking, and stands with Beck’s Sea Change and Built to Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret as one of the best “break-up albums” of the past decade. I could not bear to remove my headphones, and I did not shuttle between a few songs as I am prone to do when a new album enters my life and have heard it once through, trying to find the highlights. All twelve pieces on the album stand well together, creating a strong architectural shape – as albums ought to do but frequently do not – in terms of musical material and lyrical content and emotional curve, and while some songs are favored, I have difficulty not dropping the needle on side A and not letting the needle trace its way to the paper; I have difficulty not flipping the album and letting the needle groove again; I have difficulty not repeating this ad infinitum.
I am hard pressed to find a pop group (let’s ditch the “indie” misnomer for a minute) that has zero difficulty in integrating a fresh, “challenging” (for the uninitiated), and consistent harmonic language with timbres and textures that at once evoke and hegemonize all the band’s influences, from The Beach Boys down to The Walkmen. I do not think I can name another pop group that has no problem (and maybe implacable tolerance for) completely nixing the three-chord tonic-dominant scheme in favor of modal harmonies that move more toward Messiaen than Miles. I cannot think of another rock drummer in a band formed after 2000 that has his musicality under more control than Christopher Bear, who dares perform on the set like it is an actual collection of instruments and not a time-keeping device. In terms of form, even though verse-chorus is still popular and in use by Grizzly Bear (time-tested, ear-approved, perhaps), so much through-composed music permeates the album, and the softening of the delineation between verse and chorus, or verse and verse, or reprise, or subject, or sub-subject, or parenthetical phrase is incredibly welcome. Harmonically, the group is right at home with chords in inversion, nebulous tonal positioning, and something that escapes the world of good pop music at large: convincing voice leading and contrary motion. Who knew that the simplest of musical formulas could be employed so well? Much of this is helped by the incisive yet above-reproach gentle voice of Ed Droste (and occasionally his mirror-voice in Daniel Rossen), a mild breeze coming in off the sound that ramps up, withdraws, and occasionally exhibits an edge that, like the fine grit on the southwest wind, causes a head to turn, only to take more benign masochism.
“Southern Point” starts as a sea breeze turning directions, high tide coming a minute into the track, with a peculiarly piquant harmonic world: a vacillation in the verse between minor tonic and flat submediant dominant (that’s i-VI7 for the theory nerds; or if you’re counting, a Ger+6), and constant minor-major mode mixture doused with the “pretty” Major-7th chords in the chorus (is it a chorus, or an extension of the verse?) creates the world of late Brahms if he listened to a lot of Floyd and early Crimson. The tempestuous world between meter and its hypometric counter help propel the piece into the wayward, distant modulations, the drums acting as a marker between horizon and sky, somewhere between Samba and Jack DeJohnette.
Perhaps the most direct, non-confrontational pop song on the album is “Two Weeks,” which has had plenty of indie-station airplay and was even thrown into an iTunes promotion (which, no doubt, helped the album debut at the #8 spot on Billboard). This song, while beautifully constructed – again, Bear is in command of the entire ensemble with his subtle, well-orchestrated percussion – belies the rest of the album. While the preponderance of vocal harmonies in thirds and fourths and usage of the Lydian mode can serve as exemplars, the clarity of the form and the conventionality of the harmonic language (to an extent) may serve as a bad example to the lay audience. Nonetheless, Droste’s lyrics provide the necessary smokiness, ghostliness, and coldness to counter some of the sweetness in the convention. The text of the song, of lingering and forgetting (perhaps – Droste has remarked that the content’s interpretation can be as ambiguous as the words themselves), of sludging through some sort of relationship going nowhere, of asking the questions to which no answers will ever be satisfactory, lends a sadness, a meek anger, to the dulcet gloss:
Think of all the ways
Momentary phase
Just like yesterday:
I told you I would stay
Every time you try
A quarter, half, a mile,
Just like yesterday:
I told you I would stay
Would you always?
Maybe sometimes?
Make it easy?
Take your time…
The brilliance here is the subtext: the desperation and totality of regret. Droste’s unseen protagonist, facing the cold wind, maybe even spitting into it with the demure of a true Southern Genteel-man, can only take so much of an apparent silence, of an apparent need – and a promise not met, even halfway.
“All We Ask” starts out with a riff that could be placed on The Walkmen’s Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone without question, with a tape-saturated Starburst, but this evaporates as no distortion comes into play, and the lightly chromatic vocal lines accompanied by dominant-substitutes or dominant-add-6th and a repressed, skulking, constant, neurotic percussion part. “Leave us alone,” calls the voice; “lead us all home.” Take us out of our heads. Take away the sea. Take away the sand. Or give it all back. The journey satisfies no one: “I can’t get out / what I’m into / with you,” despite the calls harmonically and vocally to simply leave. Walk out of the cold.
“Fine for now” is the bitter pill of irony on the album. “Done askin’ for your permission / Please understand / We’re all faltering / How’d I help with that? / If it’s all or nothing / Then Let me Go / We’re all faltering / Why’d I help with that?” Rossen gives his slightly-more-crooner-ish voice to the lead character of this mini-drama, stating “There is Time / So much Time,” but for everything to go ever more downhill. The washy nature of the soundworld here: the breakers soaking everyone. No one is unscathed. Even Rossen, as his voice occasionally struggles to overcome the envelopes pushed forward by rolled cymbals and reverb-drenched Telecasters. It’s impolite, of course, to kill the protagonist, but this is what happens: the dominant never appears; tonic-center pedal points linger; 7th scale degrees get thrown around like sea gulls in a gale; fake steel drums pinprick the eardrums, a fleck of warmth in an otherwise cold tide pool; the vocalist writes himself out of the story, unaware.
“Cheerleader” is cheekier, but no less insidious in its handling of a relationship soured: Droste’s delivery is imagined as a series of dialogues with his Other and asides with an audience that doesn’t hear him (or, perhaps still his Other). The bridge is out ahead; we’ll plunge to our watery deaths, but I’ve got to keep driving, because there doesn’t seem to be a good stopping place. This isn’t Chappaquiddick. This is love. That’s the difference. “I should have made it matter.” The problematic relationship the audience has with the text, though, is the statement of making it “matter.” The narrator may be taking on the long-past regrets of the Other while belching “it does not matter” when he can, a calm vine of sour grapes trampled by ponies with their eyes on the next pasture. The lushness of the harmonic language here – perhaps the most added tones and busiest of chordal textures on the album – helps to create the conflict and give the narrator (and the intended audience) a sensation of agoraphobic claustrophobia. Helpless and halting wherever, no matter how close or far to the situation.
Rather than continue the blow-by-blow, I assure you the next several pieces are necessary listening; the subject matter doesn’t vary too much, and the same rich blend of production – warm, close vocals, intimate settings for the drums and backup vocals, with plenty of spatial differentiation and depth differentiation (in short, exceedingly well-produced) – accompanies the beautiful melancholy-without-hatred of the lyrics. I want to focus on three more songs: “Dory,” “Hold Still,” and “I Live With You” – simply because of what happens musically. (“While You Wait for the Others” needs no introduction and comes close to being “Two Weeks” redux)
“Dory” begins over a pedal point on D which bursts into a weird mix of Cole Porter and the Cocteau Twins. The favoring of arpeggiated chords in lieu of solid chords – that is, Peter Buck and not David Crosby (yet another reason I can’t get behind “freak-folk” as a label) – works especially well here (as it does throughout the album) and contributes the open, desolate space “Dory” sets up with the extended metaphor of fish swimming, diving, and dying in the freezing depths due to whatever poor choices they made. But the chorus. Oh, the chorus. D major, Bb major, F major, Ab major. After a world of ct7 chords, chromatic neighbors, and others: the final fade out – the progression over a… D pedal. As it should. Perfect circle – or a spiral, if you go the Tonnetz route and favor the ultimate construction of the harmonic language in tritones and m3s. Which is more probable, given the nebulous character of the chorus’s Bb Major. The production layering and pedal sustain, in tandem with spectral desires of the D major triad, seems to create a world somewhere between B Major and Bb Major in that second chord. This is no mere Procrustean analysis, but a thorough examination of the rhetoric: spiraling out of control of these metaphoric sea-dwelling critters, descending into their grave; the metaphor dives into the music, ending the piece with the circular motion, the mild disorientation after staring into the abyss of the horizon for too long: the shock when the horizon stares back and becomes upside down.
“Hold Still” is – and I cannot put this in better, more mellifluous, or more direct terms – simply a beautiful, effective, moody, and spare piece. The guitar line 1’20” – a Lydian mode with some unresolved dissonances that moves against a I-IV motion – is simply staggering in its effect of facilitating that plaintive desperation that comes with wanting to dive into the wreck of a cold sea but knowing all the ramifications and stripping to skivvies and catching a hypothermia-induced cold a few hours later. “I’ll take our chance / Without compromise / There isn’t anything left to try.” Washing away the sins of memory, baptism as protection against future destruction. Indiscretion only exists on paper. Regret only exists in time; memory only truly belongs to one person: he or she who wants to remember, though nothing can be gained from it. “Here we go again … The story goes on file / As if we never were there at all.”
But go listen to “While You Wait for the Others” anyway. Repeatedly. I have to mention at least the circular self-destruction of sour grapes trampled in a vineyard of “I did nothing to deserve this but fuck you I will lash back and goddammit I missed and shot myself in the foot.” And, here it has been mentioned.
“I Live With You” is gut-turning. One thing Grizzly Bear does masterfully is working the emotional fader. Certainly, well-orchestrated songs, adventurous harmonic language, and exceptional musicality help with this. Still, the achievement here is in the exquisite beauty of the ambiguity:
“You brought us this far / We’ll do what we can / Return / Don’t put me on / Return / Don’t make me beg / Return / And they’ll try / They’ll try /To keep us apart”
Such circular pleading, such unrestrained yearning with the confidence that the Once is the Now, crooned and/or belted out over irregular phrase-length structures and an echoic, if not mocking, youth choir backup texture makes anything that has come out of Montreal in the past ten years look like the dung of a hermit crab. Inconspicuous and straining for meaning. “I Live With You” is the anxiety of isolation. Not being able to leave Corolla once the ferry stops or 12 gets flooded over. The song marries together the malevolence of love with the grace of separation; the hatred of sharing with the earnestness of selfishness.
The album has convinced me, if nothing else, that this world is grossly unfair, filled with victims at every turn, filled with villains before every victim, filled with perpetrators who become the mugged. The wind knocks us all down. We get slapped with a wave yet we dive in for more at the worst possible time. We dream of silent space, a gust to refresh us, and what we get is a white-hot, self-contained apparatus of self-destruction that only we can control. Just this side of neurotic breaks do we stop ourselves and keep ourselves in our own universes, our miniverses, our macrocosms. Just this side of memory and forgetting, of love and desperate hatred, is where I found this album, where I fell in love with this album, where I began to hate myself for not loving this album more. And then I realized: while I wait for the others to make it all worthwhile, I can simply take off my jacket, get chilled to the bone, and cower under the leeward side of a dune until the weather turns.
Which might be in April or May. Until then, the speakers pump the world of brine and grey tides and a narrow love of isolation into me, and I’ll gladly take the abuse. Over and over again. “[I] could hope for some substance as long as [I’d] like / or just wait out the evening.”
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