The Grizzly Bear approach to songwriting goes something like this, possibly: There’s a low tide and the members of this Brooklyn, N.Y., quartet carry four separate pails with them. They’ve got their little, bendable plastic shovels and they’re running barefoot across a beach. They’ve got the capacity for wonder and discovery of first graders — this is back when every child is an artist and every child sings loudly and proudly when asked to. They’re there scooping up and shaping the brown, wet sand into boxy, coned masses of sand into castles and fortresses, taking the granules higher and higher, designing buttresses and curlicue staircases. They get elaborate with the floor plan and design a structure fit for ocean royalty — for crab princes and kings. Then the waters begin to rise, mustering the courage to take back their land at night. They come in all foamy and rocking to and fro, wiping out this extravagant sandcastle that Grizzly Bear — lead singer Ed Droste, drummer Christopher Bear, guitarist Daniel Rossen and bassist/electronic commander Chris Taylor — just built from scratch, dismantling back down to a flattened surface of smooth, rustling grain. This is where the story takes a turn from reality. The hypothetical first grader would promptly throw a tantrum and the mommy or the daddy would have to promise ice cream or a sno-cone to soothe the crinkled feelings of the lad. All that hard work — that beautiful castle — gone in a flash of callous, oceanic aggression. Grizzly Bear on the other hand would probably jump for joy, splashing madly in the water for a chance to start all over again, to try something different, to give a different curvature to the entryways and to make it even more grandiose. You see, this Grizzly Bear released an album last year — Yellow House — that is a treasure of elastically formatted blushes and skeletons, placed upon wheels so they can be mobile and designed with a stretchiness that lends itself to tinkering with the “finished” product as much as it’s desired. I think Droste, Bear, Rossen and Taylor can and probably want to express themselves and their songs differently each time they’re done. The availability of alteration is as reassuring as knowing that pumping blood is an involuntary action. Yellow House is a record for prospectors and it’s a record made by prospectors (prospectors with the aforementioned complete plastic pail set, this time with a pan as well) — gold lodes are planted and sought out. Go down the stream with this record. It’s before the before the Forty-Niners, before the California Gold Rush, before Sacramento existed. You can crouch down by the water and pull out a nugget, move a half-mile down stream and pull out another. There’s enough of those riches in the record that makes it a simple thing to see these Bears never tapped out, just continually shaking out the dirt from the yellow and building more and more castles by night.

Grizzly Bear guitarist Daniel Rossen gives us a refresher of what he was into last week:
Phil Spector’s Back to Mono box set
For the last week, I have been listening almost exclusively to the Crystals, Darlene Love, and the Ronettes, off of the recently released Back to Mono box set. It’s not particularly obscure or cool, but it’s great to revisit this stuff. The sheer amount of percussion involved
can be shocking sometimes. It’s easy to imagine 20 dudes on a sound stage wandering from one toy to another, pounding shakers and clinking triangles. I’m particularly obsessed with “He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss) by the Crystals — truly bizarre lyrics, but an amazing production of a song. Also “Strange Love” by Darlene Love, which features one of the catchiest, coolest “sha la la” hooks I’ve ever heard. I am now determined to acquire seven pianos 13 glockenspiels and a small choir to act out my semi-orchestral whims.

Taqueria y Fonda, 108th St. and Amsterdam
I’ve been slumming it up near Columbia University recently, and this week I was introduced to probably the cheapest and tastiest hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant I’ve ever found in New York. From the outside it looks a little sketchy, and often later in the evening they lock the door and you have to knock. Also, they bring out the meat from the back in big white plastic industrial buckets. But it’s amazing, I swear. I recommend the pork pastor taco. The meat is marinated in mango and grilled, served with fresh lime, cilantro and an amazing spicy avocado salsa.

Ridiculous Argentinean fashion
A good friend of mine married an Argentine. She recently brought him back a load of cheap designer clothes for him from Buenos Aires. I mean, they are very nice and probably worth a lot of money in the States, but he’s a banker and it’s mildly inappropriate. Yesterday, I spotted him leaving the house in a cobalt blue trenchcoat, matching cobalt blue fitted slacks, red sperry topsiders, a red and white striped shirt best suited for a cast member of “On the Town” and a khaki-colored fedora. He looked a bit like Inspector Gadget. And he was going ice-skating.

The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil
That same friend in the cobalt suit passed me this book. According to Kurweil, in the next hundred years the rate of technological advancement will increase exponentially at a rate that most of us are incapable of imagining. Essentially, computer intelligence will expand
beyond natural intelligence. We will begin uploading data to our brains, altering our genes to improve our computing power and eventually merge completely with computer intelligence. That merged intelligence will move beyond mankind and the earth to the rest of the universe and we will achieve complete singularity, all information equally accessible everywhere. So there’s nothing really to worry about, really. Fuck the coral reefs, who cares.

The Mighty Boosh episode “The Legend of Old Gregg”
This is the only episode I’ve seen of this BBC show. I’m not sure if I can admit that I enjoyed it but it was noteworthy. Old Gregg is basically a boggy British rendition of Rick James, if that makes sense. He’s fond of Bailey’s Irish Cream, paints watercolors under
the sea and suggests going to “clubs where people wee on each other.” It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen, but somehow memorable.

Grizzly Bear Official Site
Warp Records