While Grizzly Bear became an indie cause celebre with 2009’s Veckatimist,  the truth is that their breakout second LP was a terribly half-baked affair. Yes, we all tumbled into a swoon over their Beach Boys-go-to-Williamsburg smash ‘Two Weeks’. Otherwise, though this was a record that worked hard to test the patience of the uncommitted, with forays into prog pastiche (flute solos! bucolic lyrics!) and layer upon layer of woozy, labyrinthine post-rock.
Four college-educated chaps from good homes, you suspect Grizzly Bear were perfectly aware of the LP’s flaws and, with last year’s Shields, they set out, it seemed, to create a record worthy of their increasingly mainstream following. Rejecting the coy impenetrability of its predecessor, this was a project that seized you by the lapel, with bowdlerised guitar solos and torrid blasts of synth.
On a hazy evening at Iveagh Gardens, the tensions between the New York-based group’s two instincts – to experiment and to crowd please – frequently bubble to the surface. They romp through ‘Two Weeks’ just as the sun is setting and their fire-flies-in-jars light show is coming into its own. However, by then, it’s been a long slog through some of Veckatimist’s less inspirational tracks, tunes that meander and chug, lurching into pastoral folk-pop without ever really leading anywhere
Thank goodness for Shields and spiky highlights such as ‘Speaking In Rounds’, which sounds like Neil Young fronting a disillusioned jazz ensemble and ‘Adelma’, a post-rock monolith that starts slowly but is soon chugging like a monster.
Preppy in their buttoned up shirts and sensible fringes, none of the foursome are exactly exuberant showmen, though leader Ed Droste makes an effort, quipping at how surprised he is to see a Budweiser stall in mystical ‘Eye-er-land’. Otherwise, the evening is a story of knotted brows, self-serious music and, now and then, a glimmer of transcendence amidst the trees and the summer breeze.