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 grizzly bear session
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.A walk in the woods. Memories don’t always fade but they can change colour over time. Especially if there’s more than one person to share and embellish your thoughts. Which certainly seems to be the case with Grizzly Bear’s new album, Yellow House. For whilst the group’s debut album, Horn Of Plenty, was largely the work of Edward Droste – produced in his Brooklyn bedsit in the aftermath of a failed relationship – on the follow-up there are a number of minds at work. After getting together a group to perform the album live, Droste then took drummer Christopher Bear (who had added some final touches to Horn Of Plenty), engineer, bassist and woodwind player Chris Taylor, and guitarist and singer/songwriter Daniel Rossen – up to the titular Yellow House that his mother owned in Cape Cod. Yet, although the music they created there was much more multi-textured than Horn Of Plenty it’s still as difficult to pin down as memory itself – with whispering voices, doleful guitars, and spectral strings and piano rising through an electronic mist.  “The songs come from a lot of different places. It’s not like I have this vision and employ people to execute it,” Edward explains. “But I think a lot of the songs have this weird nostalgia to them that reminds you of things from the past. The lyrics are important but they’re not telling a story – they’re more vague.” Yet one of the tracks, Marla, does come with a tale attached, written as it was by Edward’s great-aunt in the 40s. “She moved to New York to become a singer and didn’t really have a lot of success, but she got some paying gigs and recorded some stuff,” he elaborates. “Then she died from drinking too much. So these recordings always existed but they were on really old vinyl and my family recently decided to get them transferred to disc. There were 23 unnamed tracks and the only way to figure out the words was just to listen. The original is such an upbeat song but there’s something sad about it and we slowed it down. Dan wrote some new arrangements so it’s quite different from the original, but the words and melody are the same.”  Like Grizzly Bear themselves, it feels like finding a box in the attic stuffed with things that don’t really fit anywhere else; not amongst the electronic output usually associated with their label, Warp, or in with the sharp street-smart attitude you might expect from a band based in New York. But then, as Grizzly Bear float free of time, so they also do of place – something Daniel ascribes to recording the album cloistered away in Cape Cod. “It just allowed us the freedom to take as long as we wanted. You can’t do that in a studio and it’s really hard to do that in your apartment because there are roommates. So for that reason alone I’m sure it affected the record; there was no-one around – it was just us and this house.”
Paul Clarke
Grizzly Bear – Yellow House, released 25 September 06 on Warp Records.
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