There's something oddly diffuse about Grizzly Bear's music, something ungraspable: I listened repeatedly to last year's "Horn of Plenty" trying to pick a track to post here, loving it all every time, but was completely unable to focus in on any one track, or even a few frontrunners, until it eventually faded out of rotation and I just forgot. That's not going to happen with "Yellow House," which comes out Tuesday. The sounds are even lovelier on the new record than on its predecessor; there's the same diaphanous haziness, emotionally and sonically, but with more of a structure underneath, something to really grab onto, and that added definition makes this a truly stunning album, one of the best I've heard this year. The song that really gets me is "Marla," an exquisite, elegant waltz, redolent of faded memories, with the disorienting feeling of being lost in someone else's dream, cluttered with references that you can't comprehend.
-- T.B.
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