Grizzly Bear - Shields

not to make this a pfork thread, but just got an email from a local venue that included pf review scores for upcoming bands. :(

although i think i know who sends these out and he's a dick whose true love is xtian emo bands.

wondering what kanye thought of his 10.0

tbf, i'm surpised kanye didn't get a '10.0' tattoo somewhere

He did, we just can't see it.

I think and hope that a band who puts out a record of this high quality would be oblivious to Pitchfork numbers and/or message board response.

Yeah, this is pretty awesome. Their best yet. Their songwriting gets more focused, their instrumentation more forceful, but there's still amazing subtlety here, absolutely fucking formidable chops and interplay. Only Southern Point, Two Weeks, and While You Wait For The Others would fit on here in terms of focus and energy, I think.

One thing slightly confuzzles me, though, about them; they have such an ornate, intriguing, elaborate, mysterious, dreamy sound and aesthetic, and yet so often such prosaic song titles. Feels really at odds sometimes.

i wish the whole record was as muscular and tortoise-y as 'sleeping ute'

The end of Yet Again is muscular as hell. And Speak In Rounds. There are flurries elsewhere, but nothing as consistently as Sleeping Ute, granted.

Veckatimest never fully hybridized Ed and Dan's songwriting voices the way Yellow House and Shields do. I mean, I liked every Veckatimest song on its own, but the contrast in sentiment between "I live with you" / "...Others" and "Two weeks" / "Cheerleader" / "Foreground" was not all that complimentary. Dan's seriousness made Ed's breeziness feel lightweight. And vice versa; Ed's stuff made Dan's songs sound wilfully difficult and mean. Tiny complaints! Veckatimest is rad. But I think Shields is an amazing thing to hear as a followup.

So I am the only one here who doesn't get this forced, hipster-prog wankfest, what 'Shields' is.
OK, not that bad, but both 'Yellow House' and 'Veckatimest' were much more likeable records, and this is a way overrated.

Think I prefer Veckatimest as a whole but this has some very good moments.

i don't really like dan that much but i love ed a lot so while i understand where a post like owen's is coming from, that there's a richness in the synthesis of their songwriting styles, to me it kind of sounds like, i don't know, if ringo were singing lead on 3/4 of beatles songs. "yet again" is great.

So I am the only one here who doesn't get this forced, hipster-prog wankfest, what 'Shields' is.

i don't get it either! i've been trying to because people whose taste i trust are into them/this album, then i saw GB live yesterday and only lasted for four songs bc i was bored :/ i can hear some of what Owen P's hearing in Speak in Rounds though.

the griz are not for everyone, i wouldn't sweat it

"forced, hipster-prog wankfest" made me immediately want to listen to it

lol

I hope it's their most forced, wanky album to date.

haha everything i can't stand about indie rock

i'm certainly not sweating it

I really liked Yellow House, thought Veckatimest was fine, but I just do not get the accolades for this one. I'm not feeling any heart in these songs. Everything feels so futzed over and measured that they become virtually lifeless. Fwiw, the best thing they've probably done was the Friends EP.

i just find it funny that people i know are like "ooh all those weird sounds and harmonies, amazing!" and i listen to GB and feel nothing, like a sweatless robot

First couple of tracks are not wowing me -- there haven't been any of those hang-glider suddenly over the grand canyon moments yet.

I don't really find this wanky, but I do agree that it's kind of lifeless.

I mean, right now this is number 2 on the 2012 charts for highest rated albums by RateYourMusic listeners (lol @ using that as a measure, but still) right behind the Swans record. It just blows my mind that people would be rating this nearly as highly as that.

i thought you would like the first one, hurting (it's definitely the proggiest to my ears).

this record is neat! the songs all sound really twisty and deliberately plotted which sets up these great sun-through-the-clouds moments where they briefly unwind into a familiar sequence of chords or melodic phrase before spiraling back off again

i think 'gun-shy' is my favorite track thus far

I didn't dislike the first track, xp, I just found it a bit unmemorable. The rest of the album moreso, especially compared with past records.

i wish they made a pure rock album. it might sound great.

I wish they went back to vocal harmonies and unusual song structures.

yeah that would be nice too. yellow house style

Good work cameoing at GB's Massey Hall show earlier tonight, Ówen--"Half Gate" was esp. amazing.

Craig you should've texted me!

Grizzly Bear Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012? - Nitsuh Abebe

Great piece. The financial struggle of musicians these days really concerns me.

Yeah, interesting topic, but perhaps not the best band choice to demonstrate it. I mean, it's kind of hard to feel sorry for Droste and his financial woes when his family owns their own island.

Owns their own island? Is it a big island? Does it make them any money? Can / do they live there?

uh that's wrong, no one owns an island

Yeah, I'm wondering if there's confusion there between album titles / recording locations. Droste's grandma owns a yellow house.

yes she owns a house on cape cod in massachusetts, vecky was named after a small island off the coast of cape cod.

Maybe Chris Bear's uncle owns a shield.

just going to quote the money shot here for ref since there is already confusion

Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with “a nice little ‘Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.’ ” They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. ... After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (“Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage”), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. “I just think it’s inappropriate,” says Droste. “Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.”

reading this makes me really sad

Yeah, and you also have to factor in that these guys are probably at the peak of a career that won't stay at this level for more than a few more years. Then what -- 40 years old with no groundwork for a career unless it's in something indie-music-related.

Kind of makes me glad I didn't try to stick it out longer with music though.

I kind of feel it doubly with GB because they're all my age or thereabouts. Think one is slightly older and the rest slightly younger. I don't earn a lot of money, but we're about to buy our second house, these guys do a great job, do it responsibly and creatively, and they can't all afford health insurance (obv as a Britisher I find the Yank system pretty awful anyway). When footballers earn more in a week than I do in a year, that seems fucked-up.

Re: that quote. Obv. the amount of money that a band at GB's level comes home with after a tour is gonna be "a pretty sweet figure" and there's no wonder dude didn't want to disclose. It doesn't take into account the cost of gear or the cost of living during writing/recording periods. Nor does it take into account that if you add up a "best case" income for an indie musician per year from age 20 to 65, divide it by 45 years, you'll get an income that's slightly less than an elementary school teacher. (This is a serious "best case" estimation, too.)

truth bomb/heartbreaker

Part of why the indie-rock world bristles at calculation is that calculating your music’s effect can seem suspiciously like pandering your way toward success. And, perhaps, money. And in these parts, at least, audiences can react badly to musicians who acknowledge a relationship with money—whether wanting more of it, complaining about not having enough of it, or really doing anything other than being immensely grateful that people appreciate the work. Even if said people are stealing it. You will rarely hear an indie act complain about piracy; if they’re successful enough to care, they achieved that success in an ecosystem built on piracy from the get-go. But Droste will say that paying $9 for a digital download of an act’s new album—the price of “a fucking appetizer, a large popcorn at the movie theater, and you’ll have it forever, and they took two years to make it”—matters more than people seem to think, and not just in terms of income. “Maybe they’ll get on the radio. Every record sold shows the industry your value.” Meanwhile, streaming the album from a service like Spotify nets the musicians almost irrelevantly small amounts.

Yeah, it's weird that I may actually earn a better living, overall, than Grizzly Bear dudes, when they're famous and loved by at least hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, and probably contribute way more of value to the world than I do.

uh that's wrong, no one owns an island

― call all destroyer, Monday, October 1, 2012 8:47 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol, one of my entertaining coworkers owns an island. It's somewhere bahamas-ish, tiny, and his family camped on it a few times. I think it cost $10-20K, worth quite a bit more now, but no one wants to buy it.

One point I would add to the discussion is that these guys live in New York (presumably Brooklyn), and it's really fucking expensive to live here. Maybe bands just shouldn't live here once they're touring all the time anyway. Not that that would solve everything.