Charles Davis
Five years ago, Stephen Colbert described Grizzly Bear as “the Beach Boys on cough syrup.” With Painted Ruins, the sublime psychedelia of that comparison remains, but the simultaneously sprawling and measured cacophony of the band’s earlier work has been compressed and neutered somewhat in favor of a more modern pop ethos. Grizzly Bear’s eschewal of traditional indie-pop conventions has long been an inseparable part of the brilliance of their work; perhaps no other band of their ilk has created such an evocative sense of space as can be found on songs like “Will Calls” or “Colorado.” With that willingness to pause and take a breath being noticeably absent on Painted Ruins, the result is an album that at times feels like its form and its substance are at odds with each other.
"This video is Not Suitable For Work, are you sure?"
The heaviness of Painted Ruins’ instrumentation has been widely noted elsewhere in the music blogosphere, but Grizzly Bear has never been afraid to get heavy—consider the chaos of the outro of “Yet Again,” or the bracing wall of sound on “Lullaby.” Heaviness is not new for Grizzly Bear, but that heaviness being sublimated into the steadier rhythms featured in much of Painted Ruins casts it in an entirely new light. In the band’s earlier work, intensity and noise seemed to be tools to outline the musical space they were leaving; now it feels as though they delineate the bounds of the space they inhabit.
None of this is to say that more poppy stylings are entirely new for Grizzly Bear, or that they don’t inherently work with their sound. “Knife” and “Two Weeks” both traffic heavily in traditional pop motifs while still managing to be masterpieces that transcend their genre. “Three Rings” is a clear standout in this tradition on Painted Ruins. Ed Droste’s perfect delivery of spurned, manic desperation, backed by the band’s sublime vocal harmonies, sticks indelibly in your mind. It’s one of the band’s best songs to date, and it feels like it was intended as something of a lodestone for the rest of the album: a rebellious, weird, substantive inversion of The Pop Song in their own signature style. Much of the rest of the album—the singles “Mourning Sound” and “Neighbors” in particular—pretty clearly reaches for what “Three Rings” achieved, but never quite transcends the form in the same way and ends up feeling a bit directionless.
Painted Ruins features many of the most beautiful elements of Grizzly Bear’s previous work. There are lovely little bits of ethereal synths that drift in at just the right moment, percussive guitars to provide the dissonant color that makes the band’s songs so recognizable, strange background sounds that add a sense of depth, and gorgeous, full-band vocal harmonies. But with some of the album’s more cerebral aspects overshadowed by its formal elements, that beauty feels wanting for an appropriate vessel.