Grizzly Bear

Painted Ruins

I still have a few tracks to go, but this falls in that common category in my head: "admirable but not quite likable." Grizzly Bear seem determined to rid rock of predictable chord changes, which as a longtime chord enthusiast I appreciate; still I acknowledge certain chord changes prevail over time for certain objective reasons. A ii-V-I has sonic qualities that would persist past human extinction. Why those qualities please the human mind I can't comprehensively trace, but I can observe the tension-resolution pairs more numerous than in other changes. The most obvious is (assuming justifiably the V is a V7) the tritone 4-7 (the most dissonant interval) diverging a half step on either side to the most consonant, 1-3. Including the ii, you have the top note stepping up 6-7-8. I doubt I'm doing justice to everything going on in a ii-V-I, so I'll stop. But I think music is partly objective, not aesthetically but logically, and the human mind thinks logic is aesthetic. Patterns are pleasant, familiarity feels good, especially when those patterns make some logical sense. I think the aesthetics of music are primarily explained by tension-resolution dynamics of dissonance "beats." I'm at the limit of my knowledge and articulation again, so I'll stop again. Anyway Grizzly Bear stubbornly eschews tried-and-true changes. Perhaps they just think chordal creativity is their duty, as no one else is doing it. Or perhaps they give no credence to historical precedent. Perhaps they think Christianity prevailed by luck, being in the right hands in the right nations in the right eras. Perhaps they assume many other planets in the galaxy could host life with a little encouragement. No, Grizzly Bear, Christianity and Earth and a ii-V-I all have kingly qualities. If you want to spritz the water of life on every planet in the galaxy, every religion on Earth, and every imaginable chord change, you may find something sprouts after a while, but you should expect innumerable failure in the meantime.

That said, their chords aren't that bad. At best they're lush and disorienting. At worst they're cringingly crooked (see anytime they use dominant 7 chords or anything bluesy). I think some of these, entrenched in mental pathways through millennia, could be pleasant or even normal. But there's a lot of nebulousness to endure in the meantime. As in my Antkind post, randomness is hardly pleasant.

There was a time I fixated on random chord changes, around the time I fixated on random time signatures. I was about 15. Such experimentation can be fruitful, if you're discriminating and patient. I'm not sure Grizzly Bear is discriminating or patient (anymore?).

Context

I listened to and liked Yellow House and Veckatimest quite a bit in high school. I'd heard Shields. This was my first time hearing Painted Ruins. I still enjoy some of the older songs, and none of the new stuff is bad... It's hard to distinguish nostalgia from quality in the older stuff, as always, but I think I still like some of it. Certainly not as much anymore.