With many musicians/bands (Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Broken Social Scene to name a few) providing music to films recently, it would come as almost no surprise that a trend is starting to begin, or continue rather, of these high-profile collaborations between these two spectrums of entertainment. Whether it be complete film scores ala Arcade Fire with Richard Kelly’s The Box, or the surprising soundtrack collection of New Moon, it seems Hollywood is continuing to dip into a well that’s ripe with opportunity. There’s seemingly no end to the kind of talent that’s circling indie music right now, so I think it’s a great for many bands to expose their music to a larger demographic.
This latest bit of news comes via The Playlist that mentions Brooklyn-based indie-rock band Grizzly Bear will be providing music for the upcoming film Blue Valentine starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. It’s been a great year for the band as their latest album, Veckatimest, has garnered critical success as well as being a favorite around the blogosphere. The band also provided a track titled “Slow Life” for the previously mentioned New Moon soundtrack (so they’re definitely no stranger to this), which features guest vocals from Beach House vocalist Victoria Legrand.
From reading the synopsis, it seems to be the type of film that I can get behind:
“Blue Valentine” is an intimate, shattering portrait of a disintegrating marriage.
On the far side of a once-passionate romance, Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) are married with a young daughter. Hoping to save their marriage, they steal away to a theme hotel. We then encounter them years earlier, when they met and fell in love — full of life and hope.
Moving fluidly between these two time periods, “Blue Valentine” unfolds like a cinematic duet whose refrain asks, where did their love go? Framing the film as a mystery whose answer lies scattered in time (and in character), filmmaker Derek Cianfrance constructs an elegant set of dualities: past and present, youth and adulthood, vitality and entropy. The rigor of his process is visible throughout the film. Eliminating artificial devices, he has only the truth of the characters to work with. Because Gosling and Williams bring amazing intensity and emotional honesty to their roles, the experience of connecting to these two souls becomes truly moving.
Sounds to me like these two go hand-in-hand with one another. The Derek Cianfrance directed film will be premiering at Sundance on January 24th.
Here’s a little something to kick off your weekend in fashion, as this Animal Collective remix of Phoenix’s “Love Like A Sunset” made its debut via Discobelle.
As we all know, remixes are a dime a dozen nowadays, especially as of recently in regards to Phoenix-related remixes. In fact, around the time I found this one in particular, my inbox had about four other Phoenix remixes from some people I’ve never even heard of.
It’s just nice to actually hear a remix with some substance without it trying so desperately to be club worthy.
Here’s a little snippet from Deakin of Animal Collective in regards to this Phoenix remix:
“This spring i was in Panama with Brian. We were cramped into a van on a bumpy, winding Central American road going a little too fast. Feeling a little edgy, I put on my headphones and listened to United and Alphabetical back to back. I watched passing fruit stands, a sweet central american dusk and memories of the massive schools of jelly fish, snapper, and trevally; the few dolphin and even the few bluefin tuna (too few) that Brian and i had just had the joy of diving with. The blend of all of these things put me at ease. Phoenix has been a staple for all four of us since Dave and Noah brought home United from the record store they used to work at. One of the records that would get us through some of those long cross country tour drives, we’ve listened to Phoenix’s jams many many times. We were all totally psyched to get asked to do this and it was super fun to work on it. All the best to those dudes.”
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To keep the goods coming, You Ain’t No Picasso recently posted a full video of Grizzly Bear and Victoria Legrand of Beach House performing the song “Slow Life” together in Columbia, Missouri.
If you hadn’t heard already, this is one of the many tracks from some well-known musicians making its way onto the New Moon (along with Thom Yorke, Death Cab For Cutie, Bon Iver/St. Vincent, etc.) soundtrack.
Definitely cringe-worthy, but just think of some thirteen-year-old picking this up and receiving a proper musical education. I think with that in mind, I’m perfectly okay with it.
Lots of great releases this week, which include two highly anticipated albums from both Grizzly Bear and Phoenix. Definitely worth picking each of these up as they each live up to lofty expectations, and I’m sure they will be populating many people’s year-end lists. A few other interesting releases include Black Moth Super Rainbow’sEating Us and Viva Voce’sRose City.
Anything else worth picking up this week? Let us know if we happened to leave off anything!
If some of you decided to hold off on downloading that horrid quality leak of Grizzly Bear’sVeckatimest, than you may be interested in snagging a free download of “Cheerleader,” which was made available last week courtesy of Warp. Listening to it only bums me out even more that I wasn’t able to get into any of their performances at SXSW last week. Which leads me to this video recording that has been floating around of the band being joined on stage by Victoria Legrand of Beach Houseto sing backup vocals for the stellar “Two Weeks,” at the Cedar Street Courtyard.
Val and I were actually in line for this, as I had been looking forward to this since arriving in Austin. I think we were there for all of ten minutes before finding out the line had not moved for nearly two hours, or something ridiculous like that. Of course, we didn’t hang around much longer after that. This, my friends, is why YouTube is such a wonderful thing.
Yes, Grizzly Bear’s new album Veckatimest did leak the other day (much to the chagrin of Ed Droste, according to his twitter), but don’t expect to see any tunes posted here. I’m perfectly fine with waiting until May 26 when Warp finally releases the highly anticipated album. Though, the word from most everyone who has heard it has been very positive. This obviously doesn’t surprise me, I mean, have you heard those live versions? Those songs are so good. They’re definitely reaching for the stars with this one.
Anyways, here are the dates for the upcoming tour which will coincide with the release of Veckatimest. I’ve regrettably passed on every chance I’ve had to see them in person, so i’m hoping to not make the same mistake this time around.
Grizzly Bear tour dates
5/24 Portland, OR @ Aladdin Theatre
5/25 George, WA @ Sasquatch Festival
5/26 Vancouver, BC @ Commodore
5/28 NYC @ Town Hall
5/29 NYC @ Town Hall
6/01 Washington DC @ 930 Club
6/02 Philadelphia, PA @ Trocadero
6/03 Boston, MA @ Berkley Performance Center
6/04 Montreal, QUE @ Le National
6/05 Toronto ON @ Phoenix
6/07 Minneapolis, MN @ Cedar Cultural Center
6/08 Milwaukee, WI @ Pabst Theatre
6/09 Bloomington, IN @ Buskirk- Chumley
6/11 Carrboro, NC @ Cats Cradle
6/12 Manchester, TN @ Bonnaroo 6/13 Atlanta, GA @ Tabernacle (With TV On The Radio)
6/15 Dallas, TX @ Grenada
6/16 Austin, TX @ The Parish
6/19 Los Angeles, CA @ Wiltern
6/21 San Francisco, CA @ Fillmore
Can Grizzly Bear do anything wrong? Because they just seem to effortlessly turn out new tunes that completely slap the ugly off the faces of millions. I actually had no idea that the group recently performed on Letterman, let alone the fact that they were performing a live debut of “Two Weeks,” which presumably will find its way on the upcoming record. As soon as I heard Ed Droste’s vocals in the beginning, I just knew that this song was going to be fantastic. It almost makes me wish for a Grizzly Bear/Beach House tour sometime in the near future. But hey, Grizzly Bear/Radiohead is good too!
In an interview with Velocity Weekly, Droste talked a little bit about the Letterman performance.
“It was a bit strange debuting a song on late night TV, nobody having heard it, never having done it live in front of people, only us in our rehearsal space,” Droste said the day after. “So we were more on edge than usual, but after a shot of tequila, everyone’s nerves calmed a bit.”
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The band has also kindly made the song available for free download via their website, so check it out.
The guys from Grizzly Bear made an appearance last night on Conan O’Brien – which I intended to watch, but soon forgot about it as soon as I got home from work. It seems to happen way too often, which is why i’m thankful that a video of a missed performance is always certain to appear the following day. The band performed a brand new song (new for television, that is) “While You Wait For The Others,” which made the rounds a few months ago from an in-studio performance on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic.
I never had a chance to post that song here, which I will be rectifying now, but it’s pretty much the exact same song as on the Conan performance. That being said, the song kills – especially that second half, where at one point Ed Droste breaks into that small moment of ‘oooooo-o-oooohh’ that just soothes my soul to no end. I swear, Grizzly Bear is simply the perfect medicine for any sleepless night. Oh yeah, they’re also opening for those Radiohead dudes on the second half of their U.S. tour.
I think almost all of the blog-0-sphere love the new Grizzly Bear record–Yellow House. I know this blog has posted about it several times. And as for why I am posting about them again? One might say I’m, “…slightly obsessed.” I was reading Rewriteable Content a few weeks ago and I saw the video they had posted of the song ‘Shift’, which is off the Horn of Plenty album. I agree with most of the comments on youtube.com in the sense that this video is indeed “Haunting and beautiful” “Heart-stopping” “Breath-taking” and “The best video I’ve seen on Youtube so far”.
Here’s the video for ‘Shift’:
The band recently played for KEXP.org in NYC. As you can tell, they like to re-work the songs and let them evolve, as band member Ed Droste said during a Brookly Vegan interview. Be sure to catch them live if you get a chance you can see where they’ll be playing at Grizzly Bear’s myspace.
Grizzly Bear – Shift (Live on KEXP 9/14/06)
Grizzly Bear – Shift (off of Horn of Plenty)
Last night I couldn’t sleep at all, as it happens every once in a while. It’s times like that when you’re just sitting in your chair in the middle of the night that an album like Yellow House, the upcoming second album from Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear, becomes the perfect medicine for a sleepless night. An album that’s not trying to come off as ambitious but easily is very much so. It’s easily one of the most beautiful records i’ve heard all year.
I’ve had this one sitting around for a while, but I hadn’t really been in the mood to fully absorb it. But late last night, i listened to this one all the way through. It’s like something just clicked, and all of a sudden what I was listening to made perfect sense to me. You can’t just randomly pop this in and listen, you have to really sit down and patiently absorb every small detail this has to offer. For me once I was into it, I felt like I was taken along for a ride to a soundtrack of lullabies. From the very first track “Easier” it sets the mood and tone for the entire album, and never wavers from this. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you give the music an opportunity you won’t be disappointed. It’s scattered with wonderfuly complex melodies and harmonies that have an almost haunting atmosphere to it.
From their website:
Grizzly Bear do not skimp. They’re remarkable not just for their attention to detail but for their concern for how a song FEELS: flush with heart and melancholy, their music is seductive and intimate, deep with hazy-eyed choruses, whistles, piano and banjo. They know melody and ambiance are necessary complements. This is experimental mood music with love for classics and standards. It’s the kind of stuff you yearn to crank up when you’re lying in bed on a Sunday.
I was reading their website and came across that paragraph, and that just pretty much sums exactly how I feel about this album. It’s definitely something you can just listen to and lose yourself in it’s beauty. After all these pop albums i’ve been listening to, it’s nice to have a little change to the pace of music we’ve been covering here. This is an album to look forward to people, and I believe you will love this one. Look for it when Yellow House is released September 5th on Warp Records.
With many musicians/bands (Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Broken Social Scene to name a few) providing music to films recently, it would come as almost no surprise that a trend is starting to begin, or continue rather, of these high-profile collaborations between these two spectrums of entertainment. Whether it be complete film scores ala Arcade Fire with Richard Kelly’s The Box, or the surprising soundtrack collection of New Moon, it seems Hollywood is continuing to dip into a well that’s ripe with opportunity. There’s seemingly no end to the kind of talent that’s circling indie music right now, so I think it’s a great for many bands to expose their music to a larger demographic.
Lots of great releases this week, which include two highly anticipated albums from both Grizzly Bear and Phoenix. Definitely worth picking each of these up as they each live up to lofty expectations, and I’m sure they will be populating many people’s year-end lists. A few other interesting releases include Black Moth Super Rainbow’s Eating Us and Viva Voce’s Rose City.
If some of you decided to hold off on downloading that horrid quality leak of 
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