Daniel Rossen is one cerebral dude, and my current conclusion on cerebral dudes is that they’re better off messing with their audiences’ heads than their own. I have nothing against Grizzly Bear, besides the fact that I keep thinking their albums are going to be all-time faves — then quickly gather dust — but anyone who knew Rossen pre-brooding-straitjacket-folk can only manage a murmur: “I dunno… You’ve changed, man.” I’m cheating a bit here, having discovered Department of Eagles’ mind-bending masterpiece The Whitey on the Moon UK LP (re-released as The Cold Nose in 2005) the same year that Yellow House came out. But Polish magazine Porcys, who championed the record in their ‘05 demidecade list, sure weren’t cheating. To Porcys, Whitey’s hyper-independent scattershot approach signified something huger. Rossen was playing a rewarding game of blind man’s bluff, but the joke’s not so funny now that he can’t get the blindfold off.
Archives is a misleading title, because the ways Rossen (“Iron Chrysalis”) has used his Department of Eagles moniker in the last few years is enough to confound any archivist. Let me see if I can get the touchstones in chronological order:
• The Whitey on the Moon UK LP (2003) – Rossen and Fred Nicholaus (“Butterfly Emerging”) are fertile roommates. They record cool electronic scraps, remix opera singers, lay down lo-fi indie pop, sabotage each others work and end up with an incredibly diverse and rewarding album with more than one screw loose. Blows a few collegiate minds, but mostly doesn’t find an audience.
• Archives 2003-2006 – Rossen rooms with Chris Taylor at some point and noticeably changes his sound into something a little more drab and moth-eaten. Stitching together disparate ideas, he seems to say, is easy with a computer, but challenging in a folk paradigm. Role of Nicholaus questionable.
•Yellow House (2006) – Rossen’s aesthetic is so similar to early, solo-Droste Grizzly Bear that critics confuse their voices. The album functions well as a whole; thus, no one notices off the bat that Ed Droste’s songs like “Knife” lean towards soaring inflections of 50s-pop while Rossen’s tend to integrate several parts and eat themselves.
• In Ear Park (2008) – A testament to all that Rossen has learned from Droste’s pop sensibility. Cokemachineglow.com goes so far as to suggest that it’s basically another Grizzly Bear album. It’s nothing like Whitey, but still a good collaborative effort between old friends. So simple and streamlined, really, it was destined to be forgotten.
• Veckatimest (2009) – Now that listeners have really taken notice of the dynamic between the two, Grizzly Bear carves out a home for itself in the first two tracks. Droste’s “Two Weeks” is an even tighter paean than “Knife”; Rossen’s apocalyptic “Southern Point” is a hodgepodge of ideas, including a melodic reference (“calling us”) to the upcoming “All We Ask,” eschatological choirs and a guitar part from “On A Neck, On A Spit” that’s so familiar it can act as spongy connective tissue between movements.
• And then…?
Rossen ends up accounting for as many of Grizzly Bear’s failures as its successes: his tracks are so psychologically dense and orchestrated that a wrong step like “Dory” can be almost a hassle to listen to. That being said, Rossen is now, possibly, ironically, more integral to Grizzly Bear’s aesthetic than Droste. Droste used to be dense/dark, but now he’s throwing all of his four-chord weight into counterbalancing Rossen. This sounds antagonistic, but such tensions birth amazing artwork.
Archives 2003-2006, however, mostly stands to highlight what a match made in heaven the two were before the Yellow House recording sessions. “Practice Room Sketch 1” opens with the exact same ascending jazz chords that “Easier” does. The listener’s project becomes so clear it’s like being assigned homework: spot all the motifs from Rossen’s other works! Pure folly, though — I don’t think Rossen’s keeping track himself. That particular nylon arpeggio that’s in, like, half a dozen Grizzly Bear songs is as much a seal as Lennon’s “Dear Prudence”/“Look At Me” fixation. That “whooo!” in “Practice Room Sketch 2”! Did that peek up in the climax of “Little Brother”? Or is this, also, in too many Grizzly Bear songs to track? I don’t like this game. I don’t know which side of the skull I’m on.
A better approach is to rewind to my original hopes for the compilation — that, with so many “Practice Room Sketches,” it couldn’t possibly be as self-serious as Grizzly Bear; that its fragmentation would come with a wink — and point to where Rossen fulfills these hopes. Okay, admittedly, the existential undercurrent is inescapable here. But there’s some warmth and humor in the cowboy “hmmms” that rise out of the galloping “Brightest Minds” (hearing the bridge of “On a Neck, On a Spit” again, though). Like lushtronic types, Prefuse 73 to Pogo, I am a total sucker for the romantic vintage harmonies of early-20th-century films (think embryonic Disney, think Dorothy’s Emerald City prance). None of this can really feel like play anymore — Rossen’s too aware of the bad-trip duality between nostalgia and a nausea — but they give the songs a point of reference without actually anchoring them. The triumph of Archives is its unexpected airiness.
Which is why, even though Rossen’s songs are even more structurally tortuous than they are in his other work, this is still a better candidate for casual immersion than Veckatimest. Rossen’s apostles break down walls when he bumps into a chair; directions and transitions don’t seem so crucial when they’re not around. I am genuinely curious about where Grizzly Bear will go next, but their work increasingly hints at many ivory-tower trappings: it’s knotty, assumptive, imposing, modernist, and goes basically unquestioned. Another Veckatimest has no hope of hitting as hard. Archives gives us a glance at how studiously Rossen transformed himself into a puzzle piece for the outfit, but I’m convinced that he’s too progressive and flat-out contemporary to stick with the group (or at least its formula) much longer. Here’s hoping that, for his next project, he and some combative collaborators pick up laptops instead of sledgehammers. While I’m hoping, Whitey’s always ready for another listen!
