8 spot on Billboard’s LP chart and spawned the car commercial/film trailer favorite “Two Weeks” (sampled by several rappers seeking to increase crossover appeal) and Shields was both their most successful release (No. “I’m sort of blindly hoping it all goes well,” says Bear, and that seems to be the consensus.īut their track record is strong: 2005’s Droste-only debut Horn of Plenty attracted a who’s-who of awesome oddball remixers, from Ariel Pink to DNTEL 2006’s full-band Yellow House begat a tour opening for, yep, Radiohead (Jonny Greenwood called them his favorite band) 2009’s Veckatimest scored a No. All express some concern or confusion over how Grizzly Bear, an intensely LP-oriented band, either fits in or stands out in 2017. They and Droste are a collective blur of logoless tees, dark jeans or chinos, unassuming sneakers, shortish hair, and longish stubble-hip modern dudes in a sea of hip modern dudes at hip modern coffee shops whose speakers give equal airtime to Ed Sheeran and James Blake. Rossen and I talk by phone, but I meet with the other two members, bassist Chris Taylor and drummer Christopher Bear, separately, in a similar third-wave coffee house a mile and a half away. “I’m like, wait, so Spotify playlists are the new radio? Do blogs even exist anymore? What’s it like when everyone has a trillion things at their fingertips? Will people consume an album? It’s very ‘dad’ of me, I know.” He walked here from the home he shares with his boyfriend, a Swiss-born sculptor and graphic designer. When Ed Droste, Grizzly Bear’s outspoken co-frontman, thinks about the band’s music entering this new space, “I’m literally like tee-bee-dee,” he says, elongating each letter between sips of iced coffee at an upscale cafe in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood. But that was way back in 2012 and everything-the music business, the geopolitical climate, Williamsburg-is different now. None of these things was true when they released their last album, the dark and knotty Shields.
ALBUM COVER GRIZZLY BEAR SHIELDS TV
They’re a group of husbands, fathers and divorcees of film and TV scorers, travel columnists, published chefs and political activists of bee-keeping recluses and Taylor Swift nemeses (to be explained). They’re also a major-label band, having signed with Sony-owned RCA.
Barring Rossen, who kept his New York homestead but moved to Santa Fe, N.M., last fall, Grizzly Bear is now based in Los Angeles. I used a 1987 ATV to haul wood.”Ī lot has changed, even since then. The nearest town, if you want to call it that, is like 450 people. As Rossen explains, “I left the city and moved way, way upstate where most New Yorkers never go, to the northern foothills of the Catskills.
ALBUM COVER GRIZZLY BEAR SHIELDS LICENSE
It’s decidedly not the stuff of arty Brooklyn bands with jazz pedigrees and chamber-rock inclinations-of the self-admittedly cryptic and at-times cerebral indie music giant known as Grizzly Bear, a quartet so mythologized it’s been both blamed for the gentrification of an entire borough and bandied about as an answer to what constitutes an “American Radiohead.”īut this isn’t irony, or even poetic license at work. Indeed, Google “TRX-250” and you’ll find YouTube clips of country boys doing wheelies on their four-wheelers, or vintage magazine ads showing hearty helmeted men driving hay bales around a farm. The strange part comes when a familiar voice coos, “Were you riding with me? TRX-250.”ĭaniel Rossen, the band’s guitarist and resident introvert, chuckles sheepishly as he admits, “I might have name-checked an ATV.”
Synth fuzz and orchestral hum rise, then give way to a looped groove that lurches all noir-ish like 1990s trip-hop fused to the sort of 1970s soul RZA would sample for one of those Wu-Tang songs where Ghostface sounds like he’s crying. Note: This following article is the cover story in Paste Quarterly #2, which you can purchase here, along with its accompanying vinyl Paste sampler.Ī funny thing happens just 47 seconds into Grizzly Bear’s new album, Painted Ruins.
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