Chic Beats
Ed Droste
Grizzly Bear
TEXT BY GRAYSON CURRIN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DARIAN ZAHEDI
Last year, IBM released a report about the way marketing offi- Rossen, “so most of the Marfa time was seeing each other again,
cials at major corporations are using the Internet. Though the trying things and feeling each other out. We all had to meet each
gist of the study concluded that these high-paid administrators other again.”
weren’t using it very well, the October release actually hinged on
When they reconvened in January, again at the immortala much more intriguing and intimidating fact: “Every day we cre- ized Yellow House in Cape Cod, they were anxious to return to
ate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data—so much that 90 percent of the Grizzly Bear. Indeed, Shields depends on the urgency of a band
world’s data today has been created in the last two years alone.” whose members have opted back in. For the first time, Rossen
We simply can’t keep up. Whether it’s the deluge of mp3s and Droste wrote songs together, taking each other’s ideas and
that flood the Internet daily, the information that companies extending them—ultimately executing them with a new vitality.
collect about the purchases we make, or the photos of family They wrote more songs than they needed to, edited scrupulously
pets and weekend meals our friends load onto social networks, and moved forward only with the songs that were most open to
the worldwide swell of data is best managed by supercomput- true quartet collaboration. Asked which tunes on Shields belong
ers and servers, not the people who, in essence, manufacture to which songwriter, every member balks and explains that, for
and depend upon it. It’s hard to resist the temptation of this the first time, these are actually full-band numbers. Both in proever-accelerating cycle to create and release quickly so that the cess and product, this is Grizzly Bear as they’ve never been.
world’s bytes don’t leave you behind.
“Sun in Your Eyes”, the seven-minute close to Shields,
But Shields, the fourth and most fluid album by Grizzly Bear stemmed from a piano melody Droste wrote and discarded but
to date, slyly defies that trend. True, the quartet of Chris Bear, that Rossen picked up as a pet project and spent weeks building,
Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen and Chris Taylor have never made changing and rebuilding. The result is one of the most brilliant
a quick follow-up; it took them three years to get from Horn of and audacious pieces of Grizzly Bear’s oeuvre, dependent upon
Plenty to Yellow House and three more to get from Yellow House the same mix of drive and drift that shapes the bulk of Shields.
to Veckatimest. Between those records, though, they toured and Though soft at the edges, “Yet Again” pushes toward the status
issued singles and splits, EPs and remixes. After long spans of of rock anthem, w