The rest of the record obsesses over the fear of being alone, the desire to exist independently, and the inability to reconcile the two motives.
People need each other and can’t stand the sight of each other at the same time, and none of us can help ourselves. It’s right-off-the-bat where Shields‘ lyrical themes unfurl. “I live to see your face/ And I hate to see you go/ But I know no other way/ Than straight on out the door,” he admits. “I can’t help myself,” Rossen continually confesses–defeated lyrics deliberately undeserving of the soulful swoon that carries them. At moments it sounds like a wild animal tearing at the seams of the track’s climbing riffs. “Sleeping Ute” begins with a jaunty, almost old-timey electric strumming pattern, jarringly ripped into by Chris Bear and Chris Taylor’s invasive, growling percussions. These sounds form together like a dream being pummeled awake. Drums clank and burst like rocks in a dumpster. Rossen’s strumming and picking patterns capture weird pockets of early Americana, Canterbury British psych-folk, and 60’s Spector-ized soul, and spit them back out through a haze of dreamy reverb.
A flugel horn echoes from the great beyond. All gets brought to a hard point when a muscle-y electric chord progression grabs hold with an understated swagger. Van Dyke Parks-esque arrangements battle it out with Fantasia-style chamber-music, which turns psychedelic when it’s slapped in the face by pummeling drums. Like a sort of history lesson in song–a call and response between record collections–things yell, drum, and sing at each other, not just with. “Here’s this kind of guitar style, to convey a twisted take on what this kind of music usually conveys,” it seems to say. On “Yet Again”, for instance, a doo-wop guitar swagger is performed with a sort of reluctance that shows it’s not only emulating a specific style, but commenting on it simultaneously. Compositions spark dialogues between musical styles, eras, and moods, all under an umbrella of self-awareness and mutual understanding.
The songs on Shields are conversational and argumentative. Where a former Grizzly Bear might have wandered somewhat aimlessly or gotten caught up in one pocket of subtle noise or one lyrical motif (as on Yellow House‘s “Colorado” for example), Shields is damn near obsessed with avoiding these rootless instances. Shields growls and purrs in ways Grizzly Bear has never before. Here, these polarities converge with vitality. There are moments of utter insanity, of tranquil reluctance, and of soulful ecstasy. Its a paradoxically confident study in capturing well-meaning, misguided neuroticism to tape. On Shields, they’re finding out what it means for things to coexist–disillusioned human beings, conflicting emotions, converse musical inklings, chaos, order. Together, Chris Taylor, Chris Bear, Ed Droste, and Daniel Rossen are pitting genre against genre and watching the blood splatter. Grizzly Bears four players are waging it.