1. Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear

By: Richard Trapunski

				Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear

2009 was the year indie rock went mainstream. Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest may just be the best example of this. Before their high-profile opening slot for Radiohead in 2009, Grizzly Bear were mostly blog-fodder, the latest Brooklyn band to capture the heart of horn-rimmed hipsters. By 2009, Beyonce and Jay-Z were showing up at their concerts and movie executives were paying them big bucks to write a song for the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack.

This sudden mainstream ascendancy was no fluke. Listening to Veckatimest, it's not hard to see why Grizzly Bear was able to transcend blog buzz. These tracks aren't empty stylistic genre exercises created just to be downloaded and then passed on. From start-to-finish, Veckatimest is an intricately arranged, subtly performed piece of art. Each piece is integral to the success of the whole and every detail is accounted for.

It's the kind of structural sophistication that guarantees longevity, but it's also bound to strike many populist listeners as pretentious or boring. As such, it might seem surprising that the album debuted at #8 on the Billboard chart. It shouldn't. Veckatimest may be a little less direct than most chart-catching music, but it isn't without its moments of immediacy. "Cheerleader" and "While You Wait for the Others" each pack a pop punch, while the bouncy, piano-driven "Two Weeks" is as radio-ready as anything ever produced by Timbaland.

The rest of the album isn't nearly as accessible, but it's these bits of texture that make Veckatimest such a singular, consistent album. Songs like "Southern Point" and "Ready, Able" and their layered, multi-section formats provide counterpoint to the big payoffs, assuring that it's an album and not just a collection of singles. Each listen reveals another little detail, a harmony here or a rhythm change there, that makes it endlessly replayable and infinitely rewarding. If that's something that the masses can get behind, then who are we to complain?

Video: "Two Weeks" by Grizzly Bear