Damn overachievers. Grizzly Bear are those kids whose parents never let them watch television or drink Coke, the ones who had their homework finished right as they got off the bus and still had time for their Suzuki violin lessons before dinner. The walls of their bedrooms are lined with blue ribbons, award certificates and any matter of plaques and medals, but no one would ever know it, because no one’s ever been invited over. They’re the quiet kids who stay to themselves, reveling in their reserved genius and leaving the rest of us to wonder just what exactly goes on inside those heads. Veckatimest is their latest A+, another flawless, carefully executed effort to hang on the fridge.

The bombast employed on this collection provides a heady compliment to the relative airiness of 2006’s Yellow House. The guitars have gotten fuzzier, the drums are a vivid cannon, and the vocals soar just close enough to the sun to allow the boys to stay adrift on their harmonies. The chunky bottom end of “Cheerleader” is brilliantly offset by the ethereal Brooklyn Youth Chorus, who appear on three of the album’s tracks. The Gershwin-aping “I Live With You” is cushioned by lush strings and horns, an honest-to-goodness rhapsody in Brooklyn. Ed Droste’s vocals are as pristine as ever, but Daniel Rossen gets to shine a bit on “Fine For Now” - you follow him down to every syllable of the raspy “we’re all fal-ter-ing.” And though the record slows here and there, the whole set feels complete and is easy to get lost in. It’ll take several listens to pick out every calculated detail, but since Veckatimest is an infinitely repeatable affair, it shouldn’t be that unpleasant a task.

—Joseph Tirabassi

The evolution of the female solo artist over the past fifteen years has been a curious one. My generation grew up on solid, strong voices with apparent themes and lyrical twists. Tori Amos, Beth Orton, and Bjork were wildly different, but carried about them an obvious gravity; even Liz Phair’s sexual irreverence was rooted in the serious problem of sexual inequality.
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I’ve heard my favorite record thus far of 2009.

Casiotone For the Painfully Alone’s Vs. Children is the most personal record I’ve heard this year. After the stellar compilation Advance Base Battery Life, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with Casiotone’s new material. Would it be more of the same? Or was the backlog cleared out with the intention of throwing down something new? As it turns out, this record is pretty in line with the general aesthetic of Etiquette (2006): a little more refined perhaps; a little more sparse on instrumentation (most notably, actually, sparse on the Casio tones), but still very much the Owen Ashworth we’ve come to know and love and from whom we’ve waited so anxiously for new material since 2006.
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In the world of downloadable music, the 40-minute album is obsolete. It took six years and the latest Illinois release to make me realize this, but here I am. In fact, with the deterioration of radio along with the eradication of physical properties entirely, pop music’s ties to tradition are the demons of the art itself to slay. Simply said, if you make a 3+ minute pop tune nowadays, you only did it because everyone else did so before you. By this logic, the sans-time music world should allow unstoppable song-making machines like Prince to release an album (or whatever could be quantified as an “album” now) every week. It also makes me question the motives of artists today: Why do they wait until they have 40 minutes of material to release a “full” record any more? Can they only fill 40 minutes? Or were those just the best 40 minutes of 80? Are they happy for the resurgence of vinyl, so they can have a physical limiter of their material? The whole system is in flux and it’s freaking me out.
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The first mental images to come to the brain of the average Joe or Jane when mentioning Omaha, Nebraska, would likely be cornfields as far as the eye can see, Johnny Carson, steaks, a world zoo, Mutual of Omaha Insurance or tortured songsmith Conor Oberst. Now, if you happen upon a fan of the whacked out sub-genre of rock that I like to call surf Billy garage rock, Omaha conjures one prominent spector: the band that is Brimstone Howl.
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