Grizzly Bear/ Veckatimest/ Warp Records

Listening to Grizzly Bear’s upcoming release Veckatimest is the aural equivalent of waiting for the sun to dip beneath the treetops so you can sit on the back porch and drink tea in the glow of summer sunset and watch the day lull slowly into twilight. Grizzly Bear brings out my worst Wordsworthian tendencies, but I’ve accepted this.

This album is a perfect companion to their 2006 release Yellow House, an album that simultaneously invokes the out-of-body, transcendental, mystical communion with a metaphysical Higher Power (you know, if you’re into that kind of thing) and the dialectic between the cold crispness of white breath and fallen leaves of an autumn morning in rural Pennsylvania (you know, if you’re into that kind of thing).

But this review isn’t about Yellow House. YH deserves mention because Veckatimest is a stunning complement to the previous full length. It’s difficult not to regard them as two pieces of a greater whole. If you insist on making a comparison, a good way to consider the qualitative difference between the two is that Veckatimest allows itself to smile once in awhile. Even toe-tap.

Veckatimest is haunted by the existential grieving of Ed Droste’s and Daniel Rossen’s pleading voices that linger somewhere between quavering strings and fearless choirboys. The “you” of the song lyrics may be, literally, a lover, but ultimately these are men singing to the stars. Consider the darkness of “Dory,” where Rossen sings that he should “drop her down to the bottom/…drop her like she’s nothing,” later followed by a slow, swaying declaration that the singer “can’t be here all hour,” as if to abandon her to depths punctuated only by the soft roll of a drum.

If any song betrays the darkness that lurks under even the lightest sounds on this album, it’s “Foreground.” Fans of YH will say, “Wow, Grizzly Bear sure can end an album.” (Listen to the song “Colorado” and you’ll know what I’m talking about.) The last song will dispel any doubts about the psychic space this album inhabits, despite the relative lightness of the wonderful “Two Weeks” and the crashing theatrics of “I Live With You.” Over a spare piano line, Droste sings about “walk[ing] another road” and “something…muffled,” and the telling observation, “something about this light.” Half-sentences, thoughts only partially articulated, march on to end the album. The very name of the song invites the listener to consider it closely, preferably with your heart prepared for rending. Not that you could miss this song if you tried. Not that anyone should try, ever.

-Imogen V. Shahrazad