My big brother is a concert pianist. Though my parents are the ones who kind of introduced me to music through a variety of records and enforced lesson schedules, there are few people who influenced the music I liked as much as my big brother until I was about 12, when I turned to the evil of pop and cheapened the entire musical conversation for my family.
When I say he influenced what I liked, I will say he often influenced this by liking something and forcing me to like what I saw as the essential antithesis of what he liked. When he was in a full classical or baroque Mozart or Bach mood, as much of a genius as we all know Mozart is, I wanted to find the emotional and musical opposite within the classical world – the romantic composers with their grandiose strokes. Rachmaninoff especially was what I listened to if I really wanted to get my brother’s goat. Nothing like the sweeping romanticism and bombast of Rachmaninoff to offset the symmetry of Bach.
As I grew older, I fell out of love with a lot of the romantic material, though I remain slavishly dedicated to the neo-classicists who were my secondary obsession – Ravel and Debussy. But I see echoes of the conflict, if you want to call it that, between my brother and myself in a pair of works – reworkings, frankly – that I’ve mentioned before in passing. They are by Grizzly Bear, and by mentioning them in this post, I also hereby promise not to reference Grizzly Bear again in 2010. Promise.
Here’s the first, off the Yellow House album:
(I apologize for the clumsy video embed – the file is more than 7 MB so I am not allowed to upload it…grr…)
This one plays right to the intricacy and intimacy that is the hallmark of this album. Only a couple of symphonic chords break up this introduction, which reminds me of the spindly nature of Bach inventions or other baroque works. A full banjo-handclap stomp comes in at 1:42 as an inventive touch but it doesn’t last terribly long, as there is more musical territory to cover. A gentle semi-classical breeze soon settles over the soundscape again, with lilting harmonies carrying the melody over the same intimate, intricate guitar work. Though the banjo remains in place through a final verse, the focus is back on fleeting flute runs and ethereal touches that provide the structure an otherworldly frame.
It’s that frame that carries the song out on a variety of chord progressions and flighty riffs. It’s a kitchen sink approach and shows that Grizzly Bear clearly don’t want to be tied, in these earlier days, to a single structure, to a single chord progression. They are playing around the edges, making what is a flight of fancy on their part sound a bit like a technical exercise in moving from melodic space to melodic space. It’s an intriguing journey with an uncertain destination, which provides a bit of a mysterious dropping-off point.
Grizzly Bear later took this one electric:
This one lives much more for the bombast the first version eschews and, in doing so, hews a little more to traditional structures. However, the odd time signatures and the slumping nature of their work on Veckatimest are in full evidence here. And this version provides us with the emotional climaxes the first version refuses to deliver. And it sets up to do so by starting with the line “My God, that’s not the way,” a line not in the semi-acoustic version. From there, the song lurches and flops around, recreating the stomp during wordless choruses, builds, rises, falls, does many of the things the first version simply wasn’t interested in doing. And it ends with a satisfying smack across the face with harmony and…well, bombast.
There it is. This one goes straight for the gut, for the heart, however you want to refer to it. It’s a tougher, louder, less smooth and more jolting version. And to me, it fully succeeds based on that. And listening to both puts me in mind of my brother and his classical leanings and how I countered them with Rachmaninoff and the raging romantic sea. However apt or inapt the comparison, having these versions of this song with this title brings me as close to my brother as I’ve been for quite a while. And I can celebrate that, at least.
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And here’s a little bonus that I hope makes you spittake like it did me.
