Music Review: Horn of Plenty - Grizzly Bear

In the past few months as I've been reading news on my favorite indie bands, the name Grizzly Bear kept popping up - almost always with favorable comparisons. So finally I've gotten around to checking them out. With the name Grizzly Bear I was expecting the band to be another piece of the motor that is the folk revival in indie music right now with other bands like Fleet Foxes, Blitzen Trapper, and Bon Iver. However, I heard quite the opposite on my first listen of Grizzly's debut album, Horn of Plenty.

The album starts off well with "Deep Sea Diver", as the listener starts off at the bottom of the ocean floor until finally rising back up for air at the song's conclusion. However, after the first track the album kind of loses its footing. There were no banjos, harmoniums, or tom-toms to be found here; instead the songs become mangled, morbid, and quite frankly a bit half-baked. Melodies are introduced but never quite progress in "Alligator", "Campfire", and "Shift", and this makes it seem like lead singer Daniel Rossen is rambling. The songs are perhaps too lo-fi and nonchalant to keep the listener engaged.

Horn of Plenty's strength lies in its second half, beginning with "Fix It", which features a great driving rhythm and a cool vocal arpeggio for a bridge. From here the melodies open up and the lyrics become more whimsical. The highlight of Horn of Plenty for me is "Showcase", the tenth track, which has an interesting percussion/acoustic guitar arrangement and vocals from Rossen that seem like they could be blown in any direction that the wind decides to take it.

Overall, Horn of Plenty, is a typical debut album in that it's a bit jagged and unrefined. My best comparison, would be to Coldplay's debut Parachutes (and yes, I know that this is like comparing a giraffe to a muskrat) in that both albums showed a band with potential, yet struggling to figure out who they were still. This is not to say that Grizzly Bear is going to start making ambient music and shifting to arena rock, because obviously they're not. Horn of Plenty is a somewhat respectable album that at times points to great things in the future, but it is not a record that I'm going to put on repeat on my iPod. I will definitely check out the next album in Grizzly Bear's catalogue, Yellow Houses, as I hear that it's a mini-masterpiece.

Score: 2.8/5.0