What the fuck is a Veckatimest? Part 2

I wanted to like Veckatimest, I really did. But with the album’s pretentious, abstract-proper-noun name and all the press hype, I doubted the music would deliver on any of its promises. I could tell first off that the album was trying to be big. It was ambitious, layered, complex – I decided to withhold judgments based on my first intuition: that the album is a slow, meandering bore.

Repeated listening only consistently reminded me how dull it is with every revisit. I mean, it sounds good but it doesn't sound interesting. Singer Daniel Rossen’s vocals sound like a heartbroken wounded animal attached to a reverb pedal. The kind of wounded animal that you wish Papa would go out and back and shoot with his rifle to put out of its misery.

For a band named after the California state animal (Rossen is a LA expatriate, NYU alum), Grizzly Bear doesn't come off sounding very fierce. Two Weeks’s poppy piano melody is catchy, but the rest is just this anamorphic melacholic haze. And this is supposed to be their accessible record? Their sound is known to be whimsy, dreamy. I agree, it’s a summer album that's like a dream, but one during a nap in the shade and forgotten 15 minutes later.

As for all the other songs, they all sound like endings to sad movies. I’ve imagined my own ending to Veckatimest: the band riding off into the Western sunset, fading into the distance until it’s nothing more than a black speck on the memory of this summer’s better moments.

grizzly bear - veckatimest

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