Icebreaker “Sleeping Ute”’s tinny, crisscrossing guitar slashes and full-bodied vocals make for some of the smoothest listening on the record. Several visitations are essential to digest the agile rhythms and coax out the underlying melodies. It is wholly lovely but like a cast iron structure, it’s also a bit chilly. Ornate, antique arrangements rule on high, the musical counterpart to Victorian architecture. While Grizzly Bear’s fourth studio effort reneges on the more user-friendly sound that they cultivated so fruitfully on Veckatimest, it still speaks in the same language. And for the passive music listener, that little bit of alchemy may be the last they ever hear of Grizzly Bear Shields certainly makes no attempt to recreate it. With that blindingly bright piano progression, a habitually beautiful harmony and some zeitgeist magic, “Two Weeks” appeared to stumble upon it by chance. As beautiful as their music often was, they never seemed like they were striving for accessibility. It saw Grizzly Bear playing a role that longtime fans hadn’t yet seen: that of the pop connoisseur. Along with Phoenix’s “1901” and Animal Collective’s “My Girls,” “Two Weeks” was one of the biggest crossover hits of 2009.
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