The Five Best Bands from the 2000's: #3 - Grizzly Bear

Precision. That's really the only way to describe Grizzly Bear. Every beat of every song, every note on every instrument, sounds carefully planned and mulled over for long periods of time before any of it is incorporated into any song. It's a wonderful thing, to see a group of musicians put this much effort into perfecting their craft. Veckatimest, in my personal opinion, is the best album of 2009. Yellow House, its predecessor, put them at the forefront of up and comers and gave them a spot opening up for Radiohead. And I guess that makes sense, because Radiohead seems content in letting its members pursue their side projects while they find the strength to get back in the studio and endure the creative process that entails making an actual album. This process, the art of the album, is becoming a lost one. It's not dead, but it does seem to be something that musicians don't seem to be as focused on due to the single track selection that fans are afforded now.

And, with that, it has come to be that Grizzly Bear established themselves as the torchbearers for that very art. Their first album, Horn of Plenty, was more or less a solo album. It's not fair to consider it with their more recent works. Yellow House was an exploration in melody, an album that seemed like the band testing its songwriting chops for some future purpose. And Veckatimest seems to have been that very purpose, as the ebb and flow of the album draws from what seems to be every single genre of music ever with the melodies and harmonies from Yellow House expanded into something more meaningful. Veckatimest is why people love rock albums so much. The anticipation of it, its dissection, how it sounds after that third or fourth listen as compared to the first, trying to estimate where the band's next album will take them, and then watching the years go by as one band after another borrows from its legacy. Getting to discover bands like Grizzly Bear is why I love listening to music so much. It's that simple.

Love this user putting Foreground to the ending of King Kong.