Grizzly Bear: Horn Of Plenty (The Remixes) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

On first listen, the debut disc by Brooklyn quartet Grizzly Bear sounds like a creepy, quiet little bedroom tape: Songs like the haunting player-piano track "Shift" barely rise above a whisper. But persevere and these fourteen deceptively spare experimental folk ditties will crawl into your head and hibernate. On tunes like "Campfire," singer Edward Droste spins his ghostly vocals into willowy dream sequences. The group layers voice and keyboard effects over simple guitar on "Deep Sea Diver," filtering the whole thing through a cavelike echo chamber. And the excellent "Fix It" builds from a slow percussive shuffle into a warm guitar melody, accented by twinkling xylophone and reed. Lyrics are sort of secondary here -- the pure atmospheric power of the songs is more than enough to hypnotize. Bonus: An extra CD of tunes remixed by indie-electronic whizzes such as Dntel and Solex add texture and danceable rhythm to Horn of Plenty's otherwise calm murmur.