grizzlybear_yellowhouse music reviews Virgin Media
The New York quartet describes its output as "experimental mood music with love for
classics and standards. It's the kind of stuff you yearn to crank up when you're
lying in bed on a Sunday". And that about sums it up.
If you're unfamiliar with Grizzly Bear then think of Angelo Badalamenti - the man
behind the music for David Lynch's classic early Nineties TV series Twin Peaks - and
then imagine him writing alongside Tool's Maynard James Keenan and The Flaming Lips'
Wayne Coyne and you're getting there.
Like a modern day prog rock outfit with greater sensitivity, Grizzly Bear extends
the languid into an art form, with songs noodling along in a free-form kinda way,
then assuming coherence, then wandering off again, tunefully but with no seeming
direction.
In fact, imagine walking around a really interesting-looking old house, and
occasionally stumbling across a room that doesn't sit with the rest of the place
then turning another corner and another misfit space appears. Almost every song on
Yellow House does that.
Held together by a lightness of touch that then descends into something verging on
the abstract, it's not infuriating, but it is challenging. And on that basis it
deserves a more than cursory listen.
