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It's clear that Veckatimest was made for a lot of listening. Nearly every song feels like the musical equivalent of a big meal: there's lots to digest, and coming back for second (and thirds, and more) is necessary.
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Grizzly Bear did what's often impossible for lesser acts: shrugged off the overheated tongues of the Internet, refined its sound, and put out a solid disc.
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The Brooklyn quartet Grizzly Bear has earned a reputation for dense sonic buildups and gorgeous harmonies, and the group's third album "Veckatimest" excels on both accounts.
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Easily the band's most engrossing and dense album yet, Veckatimest subsumes the listener in dreamy washes of colliding instrumentation and symphonic crescendos.
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It’s a sophisticated work, delicately and meticulously crafted, and its effete pleasantness lends itself as well to "Late Night" performances as "New Yorker" coverage.
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There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this album and on the contrary, Grizzly Bear has clearly made the year’s best album.
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With such songs as 'Southern Point,' which builds from shuffling, folk-jazz grooves into a squelchy, winding fairytale, breathtaking piano-pop anthem 'Two Weeks' and the towering drama of 'I Live with You,' we join the consensus: this is a record to swoon over.
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Really, the only fault of this record is that its most arrestingly beautiful minute is its final one: everything that comes before, however brilliant it is at the time, pales once that choir swells, just for a few too-fleeting seconds.
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If the second half brings diminishing returns, it's still more than worth the trip.
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FilterAn Album this deep-hearted and digestible call out for mass-consumption. And the more people who hear this record, the better. [Spring 2009, p.90]
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Even the songs that seem simple have greater depth than is at first apparent, and the band's skill at crafting complex music in an increasingly accessible way makes Veckatimest a rich listen.
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A feast for repeated listening, Veckatimest yields the kind of eccentricities a fan can spend months winding and unwinding.
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While Veckatimest contains just over fifty-two minutes of some exceptional music, it lacks one critical component that's essential to any form of art: emotion.
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Ambitious yet restrained, elegant yet exciting, Veckatimest is an endlessly-rewarding album which seems destined to vie with Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion for the title of the year's best.
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For those patient enough to wait for this record to relinquish its quiet delights, the treasures waiting to be discovered it are rich indeed.
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This one is probably the closest rival to Merriweather Post Pavilion we’ve heard this year.
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This back and forth continues throughout the album and makes for a satisfying mix of clarity and perplexity. In the indie rock game, Grizzly Bear’s expansive scope is unmatched.
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Veckatimest's only down side is a touch of preciousness, a need for refinement that, unchecked, might nudge Grizzly Bear towards the polite rather than imaginative. It's a small quibble. For now, this is almost perfect.
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Underneath the orchestral flourishes and children’s choirs, beneath even the frequent textural shifts and melodic detours, are a set of melodies that find new ways to cut straight to the listener every time.
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Really, in a world far too concerned with backstories and far too lacking in good old dedication to craft, Grizzly Bear's just about as boring as they come: four guys who very quietly set out to make a fantastic record. And so they did.
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All bets aren’t necessarily off in terms of whether or not Grizzly Bear have hit their plateau--recall that we did this with "Yellow House" in 2006; oops--but it’s hard to imagine them giving us more to enjoy in one sweeping statement than they have here.
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It plainly improves Grizzly Bear’s sound, and lends itself well to multiple spins, because each repeated listen reveals another perfectly crafted shard you missed on the last go-round.
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Q MagazineIt's a beautiful piece of work. [June 2009]
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Already a front-runner for 2009's most gushed-over art-rock record, the third disc from this Brooklyn quartet has a sound that is completely its own.
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The album dips and tips and ultimately soars as a result, Rossen and company having turned near-disaster into sonic triumph.
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Even as they feature orchestras, women's choirs, and Beach House singer Victoria Legrand on Veckatimest, the album is still an intimate, ascetic affair.
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Veckatimest works like a cash-back bonus, the more you give in to it, the grander the return.
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Veckatimest offers more than just an inventive exercise in collage: It’s like hearing the past few centuries of music playing in symphony, which sounds--thrillingly and reassuringly--like the future.
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The musical emphasis subtly shifts, from track to track and within tracks to create something that feels rather greater than the sum of its parts.
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While I’m not sure Veckatimest is the huge improvement on Yellow House that some blogs claim it to be, it’s unquestionably a lovely record and it deserves to be heard on land, sea, indoors and out.
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Under The RadarThis is a superb record, a spirted illustration of sepia-tinged Americana that feels linked inextricably with Animal Collective's "Merriweather Post Pavillion" as one of the not only most hyped, but also finest records of 2009. [Spring 2009, p.66]
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Combine some of the best pipes in the game with Grizzly Bear's newfound comfort in executing the grand & epic, and you've got Veckatimest; a total triumph that threatens to dwarf their own previous "House."
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 199 out of 216
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Mixed: 5 out of 216
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Negative: 12 out of 216
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Nov 5, 2010
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RyeR.May 29, 2009The year's best album. With a bullet.
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AndyMay 27, 2009