There's hardly an album cover out there that so perfectly encapsulates the music inside: sedate, calm, tasteful. The French director Robert Bresson was fond of having his actors do dozens of takes of each scene, just to tire them out so they'd be too exhausted to "act", so he could get the performances he wanted out of them. This album has the same feeling--it sounds tired. Lead vocalist Ed Droste sounds like he's been taking gallons of Sudafed and the rest of the band plods along behind him. I suppose you could call this a "folk" record although the instrumentation is too varied for that label to stick.
Yellow House sounds as though every moment has been so slaved-over, so
studied, that there's absolutely no room for interest or surprise. These guys aren't here to have fun, and while I can respect that to an extent the whole thing is so labored and humorless that it's a real chore to sit through. It's an album you
admire, not
like. Still, they manage to get one stone-cold masterpiece out of all this--"Colorado" is almost freakishly gorgeous, one of the most stunning compositions of the decade, and the one moment where the band's insular obsessions feel earned. The rest is dense and wholly unlikable, progressive in song construction but without the emotional highs that give the best of progressive rock its power, and without the sense of intimacy that the best folk records provide. Cold and impressive and boring.
MY RATING:
5.3
Grizzly Bear - "Lullabye"
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