“Eas­ier,” the open­ing track on Griz­zly Bear’s new Warp Records album Yel­low House, has per­haps 10 dif­fer­ent fully formed song ideas within it’s 3:43 run­ning time, which is more than can be said of most mod­ern “rock” albums. That they achieve in weav­ing these ideas into one gor­geous tapes­try shows that this is a band that means busi­ness. And their busi­ness is song­writ­ing craft. The 4 piece rock band dynamic has not held much inter­est for me for a num­ber of years (prob­a­bly since Wowee Zowee), sim­ply due to the impres­sion that noth­ing new was being done with the sound cre­ated from singer/guitar/bass/drums efforts. That might sound flip­pant, but one of the things I love most about music is the promise of some­thing fresh and unique, a new per­spec­tive that shows us an aspect of music we have never con­sid­ered before. The intri­cate and dense songs on Yel­low House, by and large, ful­fill this promise. This is akin to lis­ten­ing to Spi­der­land for the first time. “Knife“‘s gen­tly undu­lat­ing cho­rus gives way to Bonham-big dis­torted drums, before coast­ing out on a sooth­ing lo-fi piano denoue­ment. The lib­eral banjo use through­out this album leaves you with the impres­sion that this album came out of some for­lorn small town in some indis­tinct time period. In fact, the entire album has a strik­ingly time­less qual­ity, like the best music. In clos­ing, I’d like to men­tion the art­work, gor­geous desat­u­rated pho­tos of the tit­u­lar house the album was recorded in. The still­ness of these images cou­pled with the almost-there color per­fectly mar­ries the sounds, and never over­steps it’s way into pre­ten­tious ter­ri­tory. Avail­able from Bent Crayon, Warp Mart, and dig­i­tally from Bleep.