Popcorn Noises

Grizzly Bear - “Ready, Able”

If I can be forgiven for spending some more time talking about Grizzly Bear, today we’re going to take a look at “Ready, Able,” one of the most captivating pieces from one of the most acclaimed albums of last year. The song makes use of a tried-and-true combo of arresting prettiness and deceptive simplicity, moving in a straight line from its textural first half to its atmospheric second half and never really repeating itself.

“Ready, Able” begins with the rhythm section of Chris Taylor and Chris Bear, with Taylor’s carefully treated bass laying down a steady eighth note pulse while Bear peppers in light, low tom-toms. As with much of his work in Grizzly Bear, Taylor takes the focus off of the low frequencies and hones in on the sound of the pick scraping the bass’ muted strings. He also introduces one of the key production techniques that drives the entire song: a meticulously-timed echo that doubles and extends the skeletal rhythms, here softening the harsher bass sound. Meanwhile, Dan Rossen and Ed Droste’s guitars pull a sleight of hand, combining high, staggered chords with a synthy reverb to imitate an orchestral flourish. The engaging textures and gentle drive can easily make you miss that fact that they’re literally sitting on the same note for almost two minutes.

After a couple of looser bridge sections (in which Bear uses cymbal washes to create a sense of lift), the song suddenly swells and drops into its dreamy waltz of a second half. It’s a goosebump moment for sure. The well-timed echo makes another appearance, blurring the organ’s downbeats and making it appear to come out of nowhere. The tempo change, chord progression, and harmonized backing vocals are pure vintage pysch pop—like something The Zombies or early-70s Beach Boys might have done. The backing vocals trade off between hard left and right panning, creating a disorienting effect as a cello backs the most notable lyric in the song. “They go, we go / I want you to know what I did, I did,” Droste sings in a lilting, singsong melody. Unlike the first half’s vague allusions to relationships, college, winter time, and learning to be a grown-up, it takes on more meaning as it gets reiterated, invoking and speaking to the notion on confessionalism instead of actually confessing. Some heftier, more distorted guitars pop up, pushing the song toward its finish line as the more ornamental voices begin to drop out. “Ready, Able” ends on the same voices with which it began, as Taylor and Bear unveil the slinky groove they’ve secretly been playing for the last two minutes.

It’s a lovely and haunting song on its own, to be sure, but “Ready, Able”s position smack in the middle of Veckatimest is worth mentioning too. Because of its two-sided, linear construction and dramatic shift half way through, it also serves as a convenient transition from the album’s more compact, song-oriented first half and its softer, meandering second half. As an addendum, check out the claymation video directed by Allison Schulnik. Set in a magical forest full of shape-shifting, yeti-looking creatures whose faces just seem to get sadder and sadder (until one melts into a river and the other gets sucked up into a spaceship), the wonderfully hand-made look and skewed anthropomorphizing of the images puts a highly poignant twist on the song’s formal elegance.