An album that somehow shares the stage with the band’s origins while sounding faraway and gone from them.
This is not just any album; it is the best album of 2012 and quite possibly of many more years to come. Prepare yourself to be dazzled.
Though full of baroque, detail-rich production and latticework melodies, Shields also offers an emotionally resonant core.
Delicate beauty and refined presentation still rule on the Brooklyn mainstay’s fourth album, Shields, but the balance is subtly shifting.
Shields works because of its complexity rather than in spite of it.
This is an ensemble that seems to have reached a sort of pinnacle in collaboration and musical communication.
While Shields may mark a transition for the band in terms of the immediate emotional impact of their music, it is clear that they have not in any way abandoned their expansive approach to melody and song structure.
Shields growls and purrs in ways Grizzly Bear has never before.
What’s most remarkable about Shields is not so much that Grizzly Bear have gotten more comfortable with ratcheting up the intensity, but rather that they’ve arrived upon a sound that’s louder and fuzzier while maintaining a uniquely ornate beauty.
The album is filled with wonderful little moments that add up to create a remarkable whole.
Though at time reaching heavenly heights, Shields is, as the name suggests, a heavy, protected album, stuffy with an ennui particular to the young and gifted.
Any mention of Shields being slightly more up front and rougher around the edges is not to say that isn't still beautiful.
The praise for this album must also be given to their ability to keep up their standard of timeless, mood-enhancing music.
While it's not as obviously big a statement as Veckatimest was, Shields is plenty ambitious in its own right, and its complexity demands and rewards patient listening.
Beautiful as Grizzly Bear is, they remain an emotionally cloistered lover, willing only to speak in vagaries, never of concrete emotional needs.
Though there are several tracks here that make for a less immediate listen, the record overfl ows with the tell-tale nuances of a band who have learnt how to translate grandiosity into something more restrained, yet no less forceful.
With Shields, they still sound like Radiohead at a Buddhist retreat, but the songs are more muscular.
The complexity and jumpy qualities of the band's 2009 classic 'Veckatimest' have been replaced by smooth, rolling, road trip music.
‘Shields’ is an engrossing, beautiful work which could only come from Grizzly Bear, and only at this point in their career. Stunning.
If their painstaking studiocraft has in the past seemed over-refined or even fussy, here they’ve discovered a new wildness, a liberating sense of drama.
More often, it sounds as if Grizzly Bear have spent their time away digging out the emotions that sometimes get buried beneath the technical fireworks.
Shields is both well-mannered and demanding, subdued but always bubbling under the surface.
Conservative ... describes Shields: Veckatimest authorized it to be far bolder. You yearn for what could’ve been.
For all the strange twists and turns, the rich layers and dark beauty to be found, nothing here grabs you and sets up home in your heart like ‘Veckatimest’ did.
The hard work they put into Shields deserves recognition, even if it occasionally strikes as too labored and considered.
There’s more than enough here to interest the brain, the feet, and most things in between.
It feels a little unfair to criticise Grizzly Bear for producing what is essentially the definitive example of a sound they’ve been slowly perfecting over the last eight years, but unfortunately the accomplishment here is met with an unexpected level of predictability.
Shields might not quite leave the mark you may have been expecting once the dust settles, but unlike their previous albums’ predilection with time and place, it’s the journey rather than the destination that matters.
Pretty but formless, Shields plays like a calculated retreat into something altogether indistinct and inconsequential.
Shields is not going to grab you, but it rewards patience.
With Shields, the New York psych folk outfit Grizzly Bear makes a move toward subtlety, toning down some of the bright, poppy moments that made 2009's Veckatimest such a powerhouse.
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