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Review: Grizzly Bear Staves Off Despair With Beauty on ‘Painted Ruins’

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Edward Droste of Grizzly Bear performing in 2013. The band’s new album, “Painted Ruins,” pushes its music further both inward and outward.

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Karsten Moran for The New York Times

There’s a magnificent insularity in Grizzly Bear’s music on its fifth full-length album, “Painted Ruins.” The band shows the concentration of craftsmen who delight in intricacy and a willingness to sling strictly private allusions, expecting that listeners will engage with layers of convolution. Yet Grizzly Bear doesn’t stint on more extroverted (if slightly old-fashioned) pleasures like curvaceous melodies, plush harmonies and sweeping buildups, along with glimpses of heartache and echoes of a more sumptuous, more optimistic pop past.

“Painted Ruins” arrives five years after Grizzly Bear’s previous album, “Shields,” and with it the band pushes its music further both inward and outward, toward the cryptic and toward the voluptuous. Its secrets and misgivings are gorgeously wrapped. In “Aquarian,” Daniel Rossen sings, “Every moment brings a bitter choice/The knowledge you can’t win with what remains,” yet a processional beat and reverential organ chords suggest pomp and pride, not resignation.

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“Painted Ruins,” Grizzly Bear’s first album since 2012.

The band has reconvened in changed circumstances. Once based in Brooklyn, Grizzly Bear now has one member who lives in upstate New York — the guitarist and singer Mr. Rossen — while the other three are in Los Angeles: its bassist and producer, Chris Taylor; its drummer and frequent synthesizer player, Christopher Bear; and its founder and alternate lead singer, Edward Droste. “Painted Ruins” is also Grizzly Bear’s first album on a major label, but the band completed the record entirely on its own before getting a deal. And it’s not trying to become up-to-the-minute for 2017.

If anything, on “Painted Ruins” Grizzly Bear emphasizes its longstanding 1960s and 1970s influences; they arrive full-bodied now, not attenuated by way of indie rock. Most of the music sounds hand played, and it’s easy to hear the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys, the guitar arpeggios of folk rock, the haze of psychedelia and the rhapsodic structures of progressive rock throughout the album.

Retro sounds don’t mean retro songs. Grizzly Bear artfully melts down older pop structures, with both music and words evading clear resolutions. Verses dissolve into instrumental interludes or make way for entirely different melodies; most songs end on ambiguous chords. And while the lyrics are full of vivid phrases, they tend to stay fragmentary and elusive.

Still, the band’s singers reveal separate agendas. When Mr. Droste sings lead, the wounds of a breakup are on his mind. “Three Rings,” a jazz waltz that’s both forlorn and insistently percussive, circles through thoughts of estrangement and reconciliation: “Let’s get along again/even though you moved around the bend.” And “Neighbors,” a pretty yet restless counterpoint of guitars and voices, suggests a later, colder meet up: “With every passing day/Our history fades away.”

Grizzly Bear – “Neighbors” Video by GrizzlyBearVEVO

When Mr. Rossen sings lead, the perspective shifts toward the outside world. There are intimations of war and refugee crises in “Four Cypresses,” a pastorale with a startling crescendo partway through, and in “Glass Hillside,” which starts as a near elegy — “Gathered together until relief arrives/eyes on the lost sons” — and moves into dark, skulking, Steely Dan-like jazz chords. Mr. Droste and Mr. Rossen trade off verse and chorus in “Mourning Sound,” a deceptively upbeat tune that hints at both 1960s bubble gum and kraut-rock; Mr. Droste sings, “Let love age/and watch it burn out and die,” while Mr. Rossen wakes up to the sounds of “distant shots and passing trucks.” Mr. Taylor has his first Grizzly Bear lead vocal in the eerie “Systole,” which concludes, “You know that I lost that key that promised home.”

Even in the era of shuffle and playlists, “Painted Ruins” is sequenced to be heard end-to-end, slowly gathering speed and heft as it proceeds from its withdrawn, moody opener, “Wasted Acres,” through the splashy finale, “Sky Took Hold,” which deploys flutes, saxophones, a simulated horn section and a tom-tom drumbeat like a Henry Mancini movie theme, only to crumble at the end. Yet for the length of the album, ingenuity and beauty have held back despair.

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