Painted Ruins

In all, Painted Ruins represents the band’s strongest compositions since Yellow House--and still, there’s something weirdly revolutionary about this kind of formalism in 2017.

These stellar new songs show that there is still a way to turn that rubble into art as we try and rebuild what once was, and hopefully will be again.

Where three years of agonised, vice-grip creation and destruction preceded Grizzly Bear’s 2012’s multi-dimensional effort ‘Shields’, the five years of space following has worked in their favour--leading to the conception of a creature that breathes confidently with a heavy sense of hyper-ambition in Painted Ruins.

The superb Painted Ruins, an album that captures the fear, confusion, and wonderment of what it's like to be alive in 2017. [Jul - Aug 2017, p.56]

It's an album of songs beautiful on the surface, but with darkness nibbling on all sides. [Sep 2017, p.18]

Only when you dive in does the beauty reveal itself. Grizzly Bear have never been afraid to expect something of the listener. That’s never been truer than on Painted Ruins.

The band’s growth as a cohesive unit results in their most accomplished album yet. Painted Ruins is a wondrously complex adventure that rewards attention and patience yet is never inscrutable.

While perhaps coming up slightly short on the nuanced splendor of Shields and the instantaneous élan of its Veckatimest, Painted Ruins is a special kind of conquest. Be it via the unseen sparks that spring forth from heartbreak or the dizzying urges that stem from one too many late-night wrangling with one’s place in the world, this is music stemming from a place that few artists can access.

Where they used to overlap neat pastoral melodies until the ground felt like it was churning beneath you, the landscape here is smouldering, godforsaken and explosive, their awkwardness untamed.

So imaginative and detailed is their sound that only the slightest fine-tuning is ever really required, and when its constituent parts come together, as during the wonderfully groggy climax of album closer Sky Took Hold, there are few that can match them.

The band pushes its music further both inward and outward, toward the cryptic and toward the voluptuous. Its secrets and misgivings are gorgeously wrapped.

While the band have clearly slowed down to create their fifth record, Painted Ruins shows no signs of stopping their quality of sound and long may that continue.

Painted Ruins is best enjoyed when you let each song carry you through its many twists and turns. And are there ever twists and turns.

It's sharply focused--and sonically beautiful--but also abstract, with an open-ended feeling to the swooping voices and lyrical ambiguities. [No. 145, p.51]

In the end, the chief irony of Painted Ruins is that this album tackling the heavy subject of all things crumbling and passing ends up being the band’s most alive, cohesive offering.

Grizzly Bear sound enchanted with the pure pleasure of texture; hooks take their time to emerge, but Morning Sound and Sky Took Hold are the best entry points to this stately, meticulous music. [Sep 2017, p.90]

A more than a welcome return, Painted Ruins is the album you suspect Grizzly Bear didn't think they'd ever make. [Sep 2017, p.111]

The project is much more avant garde than their previous records, with their greater abundance of catchy hooks and hits. They find comfort in psychedelia, ‘70s folk and the simple things in life. Five albums into their career, Grizzly Bear show that they still know how to nail the dichotomy of beauty and tragedy.

Painted Ruins is the result, a natural, unhindered expression, an album made for the audience they already have.

Painted Ruins, cursorily an album about battling demons, can feel a little like prestige music. But there’s this moment at the end--a spot where Grizzly Bear records routinely reach their heights--that reminds listeners that tangible realism can be a necessary counterpoint to the quartet’s impressionism.

They sometimes drift back to that comfortable space, and those moments make the record feel a bit longer than it is, but overall this is another interesting twist in the band’s sound.

Throughout the record, words are just pathways through which the melody travels from one sweep to the next, but nothing really comes into focus except an almost free-floating regret and confusion.

The sound is still ornate--on "Glass Hillside," nylon-string embroidery melts into gilded choirs, with oddball melodies recalling Brit proggers Soft Machine. Elsewhere, simple cybernetic beats and synths dominate.

Occasionally, Painted Ruins' drifting meditations border on meandering, but its open-ended beauty is well worth the close listening it takes for the album to fully reveal itself.

Painted Ruins stops short of fearlessly exploring new musical terrain, instead content to approach the familiar from new angles.

An swirling, abstract painting of an album, and an eclectic slow burner, Painted Ruins serves more as a fascinating indication of where Grizzly Bear could head next than anything else.

You’re left feeling that much of Painted Ruins could be a slow-burn grower, if those studiously painted collages were more emotionally inviting.