 by STEVE MCPHERSON
I honestly can’t imagine hearing a better record this year than Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House. Like a child’s game, it appears simple at first—interesting as a diversion. But closer inspection reveals a startlingly complex and consistent world fashioned from the most everyday of objects. Rather than attempt to embrace the scope of the world we’re all familiar with, Grizzly Bear, again like children, have taken as their north and south, east and west, the limits of a single house—and we’re fortunate to be invited to their tea party.
 Recorded
largely at singer/ringleader Ed Droste’s mother’s house (and yes,
it’s yellow) on Cape Cod over one summer, Yellow House was far
from guaranteed a home when the band set up camp to record it, despite the generally
warm critical reception for the first Grizzly Bear record, Horn of Plenty.
“We put this self-imposed deadline,” says singer/multi-instrumentalist
Daniel Rossen by phone from his Brooklyn home, “even though we didn’t
have a label or anybody even interested. We had these songs of Ed’s that
were old songs and these songs of mine that I wrote before I was even in the
band and then there were two or three that [the band] did together.”
Grizzly Bear’s debut was a mostly solo effort by Droste, who brought in
engineer/producer Chris Taylor to help finish the record. Taylor stayed on,
joined by drummer Chris Bear and Rossen. Assigning roles to the band’s
members is a bit futile: instruments listed in the liner notes include banjo,
autoharp, glockenspiel and various woodwinds in addition to the usual guitar,
bass and drums. This diverse palette doesn’t just provide color—the
complex arrangements are held together by and built around these nontraditional
rock instruments, with results that are just as unusual.
Taken as a whole, the album is an amber- and mahogany-tinted tour through alternately
dusty, cluttered rooms and wide-open, echoing halls. Opener “Easier”
sets the pace: A high, whistling feedback note sails out with a gust of woodwinds
trailing behind, followed by a few chords from an upright piano, half-covered
in a wrinkled canvas tarp. By way of musical antecedents, the first 30 seconds
take us from Gil Evans’ orchestral arrangements for Miles Davis in the
’50s back to the piano work of Gershwin or even further back to Debussy’s
“Claire De Lune,” and the careworn and threadbare texture of the
whole thing imbues it with a pining and nostalgiac air that makes it clear this
isn’t the past bigger and better than you remember it: These are ghosts
and demons risen from the grave.
 “Chris
[Taylor] has this way of setting up these loops with his horn so it doesn’t
really sound like an arrangement,” explains Rossen when I ask about the
orchestral bits. “Everything was recorded in one house or another, so
you get all this bizarre background noise anyways—glasses clinking—so
it ends up sounding kind of found. It was recorded in ProTools, and then Chris
has this old Neve radio broadcasting console. We mixed everything down through
this really old board that sounds beautiful, and then the final, final mix of
the record was mixed down to tape. Then when we brought it home, we were like,
‘This sounds like shit!’” he laughs. “I’m not
exactly sure that’s what we wanted.”
Clearly, the man’s crazy. The record has the beautiful quality of sounding
like one thing when heard through speakers (a thick wash of sound that moves
seamlessly from intimacy to grandeur), and an entirely different thing through
headphones (a carefully layered arrangement of instruments built around bittersweet
themes). A thorough front-to-back listen on headphones shows the strength of
the vocal melodies, which are most often tied to another instrument in unison,
or backed by other voices in harmony. The melodies are simple and timeless,
the lyrics vague and hazy (“Pressing matters bear / Enable wear and tear
on you / Tear on you,” goes one section of “Lullabye”). Droste
even went so far as to exhume a waltz penned by his great-aunt in the 1930s
and recast it as the haunting “Marla.”
“Ed is very intuitive,” says Rossen, explaining the songwriting
in the band. “He doesn’t have any kind of training, although he
grew up with a very musical background: His grandfather was the music director
of Harvard or something. He grew up around a lot of choral music. He doesn’t
really do instrumental arrangements, but he does do very cool vocal arrangements,
where he just layers and layers. That’s how the first record came together.
Chris and Chris and I all have a very nerdy jazz background, but we all sort
of quit and I haven’t had any training since I was a teenager. But we
all have this background of learning music theory when we were younger and not
wanting to tell anybody about that. I try not to let it get in the way too much.”
 It’s
advice I should take to heart as well; I could spend all day pointing out all
the subtle and beautiful bits of this album-—the way tracks stumble and
almost stop before proceeding; how “Lullabye” dissolves into a musical
approximation of distant summer thunder before clawing its way back on the strength
of the incantatory “Chin up, cheer up” refrain that anchors the
song; the explosive claps that kick “Little Brother” into unexpectedly
high gear in the middle of the second verse; the way you can practically—and
often literally—hear the furniture they’re sitting on as they dedicate
these songs to tape.
But I’m just giving the barest of verbal highlight tours here; it’s
far more satisfying to be turned loose inside this House and explore
it like children, finding every nook and hiding place until you know it like
the back of your hand. ||
Grizzly Bear perform on Sun., Oct. 8 at First Avenue with headliners TV
on the Radio. 8 p.m. $13/$15. 18+. 701 First Ave. N, Mpls. 612-338-8388. For
more info on Grizzly Bear, visit their official website at grizzly-bear.net.
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