Grizzly Bear

Painted Ruins

Painted Ruins is a harmonious, richly textured tapestry of songwriting and performance, their most mature record to date.

Painted Ruins is very much a Grizzly Bear record, with the band capitalizing on the glorious, experimental melodies that have become their hallmark. But the project is much more avant garde than their previous records, with their greater abundance of catchy hooks and hits.

The intricate compositions on the band’s fifth album are bound tighter than ever, evoking distant images and emotions that continually shift in and out of focus.

Painted Ruins stops short of fearlessly exploring new musical terrain, instead content to approach the familiar from new angles.

Occasionally, Painted Ruins' drifting meditations border on meandering, but its open-ended beauty is well worth the close listening it takes for the album to fully reveal itself.

The sound is still ornate – on "Glass Hillside," nylon-string embroidery melts into gilded choirs, with oddball melodies recalling Brit proggers Soft Machine. Elsewhere, simple cybernetic beats and synths dominate.

You get some of the space of Yellow House, some of the careful orchestration of Veckatimest, some of the more overt rock elements of Shields. But this one takes those elements and adds others to take the band’s sound in a different direction.

A swirling, abstract painting of an album, and an eclectic slow burner, ‘Painted Ruins’ serves more as a fascinating indication of where Grizzly Bear could head next than anything else.

Grizzly Bear returns from a five-year hibernation with a mirror image of their previous album, Shields.

Too much hard work – on the listener’s part, as well as theirs – is invested, with scant return.

On Painted Ruins, sonic exploration causes the album’s atmosphere to rise to salience and all but divest its songs of distinctiveness and viscera.