Taylor also suggested that his friend, a somewhat reserved but virtuosically talented guitarist named Daniel Rossen, join up too. Bear’s NYU roommate Chris Taylor helped round out the Grizzly Bear sound live, offered to produce the next album, and-what the hell-decided to join the band, too. “Everyone was like, ‘So you must be a really big fan of lo-fi bands A, B, C, etc.,’ but actually I really just didn’t know that much about microphones.”) Droste’s friend Chris Bear added some percussion to the tracks after the initial recordings, and eventually decided to join the group full-time. (“My recording technique was … very untrained,” he said later. The band began, in 2002, as Droste’s casual solo project: The first Grizzly Bear album, Horn of Plenty, is a self-recorded collection of urgent, mournful bedroom pop, its lo-fi sound a far cry from the pristine production for which the band would later come to be known. Grizzly Bear’s story is one of gradual accumulation. But somehow, the strange brew of Droste’s sonorous croon, Daniel Rossen’s adventurous guitar playing, Chris Taylor’s junkyard-gearhead experimentation, and Chris Bear’s avant-garde drumming remains as potent as ever. It requires a very particular alchemy of personalities for a band to work productively this way, let alone to exist for over a decade without an explosive breakup. Sometimes it’s harmonious just as often, sharp edges jut out.
If everyone’s in the room, it’s a little bit like too many cooks in the kitchen.” Instead, they work on fragments of songs individually, sometimes in pairs, and then reconvene and try to jam their compositions together like sonic puzzle pieces. “We would never sit in a room and all stare at each other,” singer Ed Droste said recently, of the band’s writing process. This makes the music they create together an unusual mixture of pretty and barbed. A Grizzly Bear song sounds like four people having a spirited argument about their conflicting definitions of beauty.
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