the road to… painted ruins

Grizzly Bear’s album history to date

Horn Of Plenty

Starting out as Edward Droste’s home recording project, Grizzly Bear’s debut is aeons away from the lush group sound they’d later develop. Raw and demo-like, layers of vocals compete with hisses, clicks and occasional distant drums overdubbed by Christopher Bear. Compare “Alligator” with the remake on 2007’s “Friend” EP for a time-lapse of the band’s early evolution. 8/10

Yellow House

The now fourpiece Grizzly Bear huddled in the Cape Cod house of Droste’s mother and drafted the blueprint for their mature sound. It’s saturated with domestic warmth – hymnal singing, dusty patches of piano, banjo and woodwinds, nocturnal “don’t wake the neighbours” percussion. Standout track “Knife” captured the early magic mixture of Droste and Rossen’s voices. 8/10

Veckatimest

The band’s next big step stretched their sound to widescreen ratios, with baroque song structures, weaponised full-band harmonies and arrangements for strings and chorus by composer Nico Muhly. Indeed, there’s something symphonic about how the songs use loud/soft dynamics here, yet scaled down to the intimate sonics of folk, beachy pop and pastoral psych. 9/10

Shields

Grizzly Bear’s fourth record split the difference between the last two, returning to the “Yellow House” to record and streamlining the rich aesthetic they’d mined on Veckatimest. As it sacrificed some of the grandeur and chose a more measured pace, Shields put more of the focus on the maturing voices of Droste and Rossen, developing their own tones within the band’s collective boundaries. 9/10