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Artists Of The Year
CMU Albums Of The Year 2009: Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 18 December 2009
As we head towards the end of the year, we’ll be revealing, in no particular order, our ten favourite albums of 2009. Today, Grizzly Bear’s ‘Veckatimest’.
Beginning as a solo project for singer-songwriter Edward Droste in the early part of the decade, Grizzly Bear’s popularity has risen in sharp spurts with the release of each of their albums. 2006’s ‘Yellow House’ brought the band wide acclaim and a reasonable level of commercial success. Still, if you had described to anyone the shape their 2009 would take at the beginning of the year, I’m not sure anyone would have believed you. Not until they’d heard ‘Two Weeks’, the lead single from ‘Veckatimest’, anyway.
‘Two Weeks’ is what you might call Grizzly Bear’s crossover hit. It’s certainly the closest they’ve ever got to writing a proper pop song – catchy, upbeat and easy to sing along to, but without compromising their smart, ethereal folk sound. Although, it’s not the album’s only pop moment. The chorus of ‘While You Wait For The Others’, in particular, sees the band again getting infectious.
But it’s not just catchiness which makes this album one of the best of the year, it’s much more that no note is wasted. The band make every single sound on the album count, to such a degree that you can barely believe these songs were written by real people. Okay, maybe that’s a step too far into hyperbole, but they certainly take indie-folk to a very different and infinitely more interesting place than the painful tedium of Fleet Foxes or Bon Iver.
More so than any other album in our 2009 round-up, I am convinced that this is one with real staying power. The kind of album people will be discussing in too much detail on TV shows and in magazine articles of the future.
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