I am a huge fan of Grizzly Bear.
So when I found an article on Entertainment Weekly where the band’s Ed Droste talked about his favourite current music, I knew there was a better than even chance I’d love a lot of what he picked.
And lo, I was right.
So here are the five artists that most intrigued and whose music really spoke to me – confirming for me that not only do Grizzly Bear make great music themselves, but they know how to spot other people making great music, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.
“Four Ethers” by serpentwithfeet
There’s something deliciously, gloriously grandiosely over the top (in all the very best ways) about the music of serpentwithfeet, a joint creative expression of producer Haxan Cloak and Josiah Wise, Baltimore-born, Brooklyn-resident that The Guardian rather evocatively and most perfectly describe thus:
“Gospel is not usually the kind of music that attracts tarot-reading, pentagram-tattooed occultists but then Baltimore-born singer Josiah Wise is anything but ordinary. At 28, Wise has shed more musical skins than some artists do in a lifetime: he’s trained as a jazz vocalist, formed a neo-soul group, had a goth phase and was once hellbent on being an opera singer. ‘But I didn’t like the idea of having to wear a tux,’ he explains, from his Brooklyn apartment.”
You would expect someone who sounds lushly flamboyant and winningly dresses to match to make music that defies anything you’ve heard before, and serpentwithfeet do not disappoint, creating a song in “Four Ethers” that is, in Pitchfork‘s words “fantastically operative in scale”.
It is also rather pleasingly intimate, a soothingly recriminatory but understanding blend of profanity, raw emotions and music that slinks sinuously yet grandly around elegantly, insightful poetic lyrics.
This is beautiful music with all the emotional resonance in the world, that sounds wondrously different and utterly removed and yet surges in its own defiantly quiet way with emotions any of us can relate to.
“Friends” by Sure Sure
For a total change of pace, let’s dash across the wide expanse of the United States to the sunny expanse of Los Angeles where summer is near-eternal, the living (traffic aside) is suitably outdoors-ish and alive, and Sure Sure, natives of the city, are making music that is the perfect soundtrack to this and the vagaries of life.
Vagaries? Surely music this joyously fey can’t be concerned with anything more pressing than which drink to have next or party to go next? There you would be wrong with this bouncily upbeat song, which comes in just under three minutes (thus, incidentally, making it perfect for The Eurovision Song Contest), concerning itself with the glories and bliss of love, and the frustrations of its inability to always deliver on all that romantic promise.
Having made heads turns with the arrestingly laidback sounds of “New Biome”, Sure Sure return with “Friends” which marries the maudlin realisations of heartbreak with the sort of lopingly happy music that suggests there’s still some hope in there somewhere.
Taking a leaf out of many Scandinavian artists who understand life is always a messy mix of light and dark, love and loss, and that it is always so accommodating as to neatly separate the two.
“Tremble” by LPX
LPX, aka Lizzy Plapinger, the MS of MS MR, as Interview Magazine puts it, takes us to an altogether darker, more anguished part of the romantic expression, wrestling with a relationship full of more angst and emotional turmoil than blissful moments drinking wine while taking in a prefect sunset.
One so taxing in fact that, as she told Interview, it took it out of her even recording the song, which catches you with its raw emotionality:
“This song caught me at the peak of my fragility in the throes of an exhaustive relationship I wasn’t yet brave enough to remove myself from. For the first time I was able to actually be honest with myself about the situation, what I wanted, and what I needed to say. I poured every last drop of juice I had into it, embracing every fracture, squeak, and ache in my voice. After we recorded ‘Tremble’ I wasn’t able to speak for a month. I’ve never poured myself so wholly, physically and emotionally, into a song. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever made.”
It’s redolent with all the back-and-forth anguish of someone wanting to hang onto a relationship that should’ve been a place of safety and security but which is taking far more than it is giving, and devastatingly, aggressively so.
“Tremble” is the soundtrack for the end of all things, powerfully emotionally evocative, possessed of intense beat and an exquisitely beautiful melody that pounds and paces throughout the song’s length, daring you not to get swept in the intimately, cathartic sense of it all.
“Faultline” by DEDE
Like many of us, the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States, brought a great deal of anxiety and deeply-held concern to the fore for Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste and L.A.-based vocalist for Tony Heats DEDE who poured “how they were feeling at the time” into the beauty of “Faultlines”.
The song, which is inexpressibly loving manages to fit a million different contradictory elements into its length, a reflection of how our reactions to most anything, but especially traumatic events, is never straightforward:
Describing “Faultlines” as ” a dreamy, dreary ballad — bleak but beautiful, pained and pulsing”, Stereogum notes that Droste and DEDE explained that the song was a reflection of “the feeling of impending doom in the aftermath of the election.”
Rather than being histrionic or Cassandra-like in its intensity, the song captures that rapidly-sinking feeling of the world closing in, of everything seeming to collapse at once, a feel of catastrophic loss which can dissipate in time (although Trump seems to be doing his utmost to keep it unsettlingly alive) but at the time is as crushingly intense but soberingly downbeat as this gem of a track.
“Swan Song” by Suno Deko
Finishing with some low-fi queer operative overtones courtesy of the luminously-talented Suno Deko, the stage name of David Courtright, “Swan Song” is a contemplative thing of beauty with some very real, insights on the nature of love and how the reality doesn’t always match the rom-com magic:
“I wanted to use [this song as a way] to explore male affection and friendship, but also as a way to glorify the beauty of spring in the context of a very homo landscape. The song itself is about letting go of notions of ‘true love’, i.e. that which is sold to us in movies and magazines, and coming to terms with the fact that love is a conversation, a process, a journey, and at no point does one simply ‘fall in love and the rest is history’. Love takes work, and patience, and involves hurt, and grief. So I wanted to honor that with flowers and sunshine and some gay-ass dance moves.” (Stereogum)
The song is filled with ethereal vocals, that wash you over like the soundtrack to the most impossibly wonderful romance, and yet “Swan Song” is tinged with a gorgeous, knowing melancholy, a sense that for all the possibility and joy, there is also the cold hand of real life which is always so accompanying of St Valentinic-fantasies.
Like love itself, the piano-driven, emotionally-fragile ballad is a sobering mix of exquisitely-wrought optimism, giddy expectation and the awakening of a realisation that there is much more to the heady dream that first meets the eye.
It’s beautiful, real an immersive excursion into the human soul that will capture you as completely as the beguilingly intense throes of new love.
NOW THIS IS MUSIC EXTRA EXTRA!
(source: Laughing Squid)
Sia has released the first, highly-catchy single from her Christmas album, Everyday is Christmas (due 17 November)! “Santa’s Coming For Us” is a fun festive romp, the lead song for a promising collection of entirely new Christmas songs. (source: EW)
