Skip to main content

Grizzly Bear

 130

Grizzly Bear

 


Grizzly Bear

I first got on board with this band with their 2012 album Shields & the amazing track "Two Weeks." I was a fan right away- but a lot of people would argue I should've been a fan already... the band had already had plenty of previous great albums: 2009's Veckatimest, 2006's Yellow House, and 2004's debut Horn of Plenty. It was Veckatimest that really exploded the band into the stratosphere- and by stratosphere I just mean internet blogosphere. It is always great when you can discover a band & work your way backwards through their discography & finding consistency. There is a certain beuaty in consistency. That was certainly the case with Grizzly Bear. The band began from humble roots, forming as a bedroom project of Boston-bred singer Edward Droste in Brooklyn in 2002. Holed up in his Brooklyn apartment, he laid the groundwork for the band's otherworldly debut album on a small hand-held tape recorder & with the help of Chrisopher Bear who later augmented the demos by adding additional vocals and instrumentation- gave the band a debut album for the ages, at-least the new age. To build a live show the band would enlist Daniel Rossen and Chris Taylor and would find themselves in one of the most consistent bands of the 21st century. Since jumping onboard with the band with Shields, they have gone on to release 2017's Painted Ruins. This band has never disappointed. There's no reason to be scared...

It's...

Grizzly Bear

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Eels

91 EELS EELS After a couple of song-rich, keyboard-dominated albums released under the Man Called E moniker, Mark Everett morphed into the trio Eels with 1996’s [DreamWorks Records released] Beautiful Freak . At its best, the debut gave a trip-hop twist to the California singer/songwriter tradition; at its worst, it suggests one more bummed-out wise guy’s take on Beck’s collage-style rock. With a sense of humor that skews toward cynicism that’s alleviated occasionally by bouts of sincerity, Everett is not the likeliest subject to make a transcendent album about death. But he nearly pulls it off on 1998’s Electro-Shock Blues . The music is somber but not sedate, with bursts of saxophone, off-kilter orchestration, and outright noise evoking the turbulence beneath the deadpan vocals. The singer battles not only depression but also his penchant for irony, and his struggle to move beyond them makes for a fascinating if sometimes morbidly downcast listen. On 2000’s Daisies of the ...

Björk

28 Björk Björk If Billie Holiday is an American treasure, well, if you were to put that treasure underwater, froze it, thawed it out centuries into the future and doused some acid & baking soda on it, out of that treasure chest would come Björk. Originally gaining fame in her home of Iceland with her band, the Sugarcubes, Björk was bound to break solo & she did just that with 1993's Debut . Following that was 1995's Post , 97's Homogenic , 2001's Vespertine, 2004's  Medúlla , 2007's Volta , 2011's Biophilia  (the first album where I was truly a fan), 2015's Vulnicura and 2017's Utopia . There's a lot to unpack there... you can't skip her first three or four albums, they're all amazing. I like Volta  just because it seems to be the loosest (and most fun) album she has. Vulnicura  was her break up album, with Björk expressing that the album reflects her feelings before and after her breakup and the healing process. Her legacy...

Elton John

93 Elton John Elton John The Elton Run is a great road-trip game: Using the radio’s scan and seek buttons, see how long you can keep a continuous streak of Elton hits rolling. It’s been proven possible to follow the Elton Run up I-95 from Virginia all the way to Boston. The hazard: One sixth of your listening will be devoted to “ Your Song ,” Elton’s most overplayed standard even though everybody is over it at this point (Sample lyrics: “If I was a sculptor / But then again, no,” I think we can all agree we don’t need to hear that cheesy line anymore.) But Elton has a staggering number of hits; At least one in the Top 40 every year from 1970 through 1995 (!). With his electric boots and mohair suits, he’s the prima of all donnas, sitting like a princess perched in his electric chair. He entertains by picking brains. He sells his soul by dropping names. And for all his camp flamboyance, he’s aged into the most beloved entertainer on earth. Elton’s got about a million compilatio...