Bear country

Imagine breaking up with your boyfriend, writing down your feelings in song form and nabbing a record deal out of it. That’s what happened two years ago to Ed Droste, frontman of indie-neofolk rockers Grizzly Bear. While spinning out musical yarns of tormented ex-bf angst in his New York apartment, he was introduced to Chicagoland transplant and drummer Chris Bear, who helped him flesh out his debut album, Horn of Plenty, and co-write one track. At the time, he called the project Grizzly Bear (a reference to his ex-boyfriend, not bandmate Bear). They later added Daniel Rossen and Christopher Taylor to enhance the live sound, and soon a band was born.

Their new record Yellow House, released September 5, is a dreamy blend of future-folk sounds, Beach Boy harmonies and wistful nostalgia. It’s won them acclaim and a growing following. But Droste says folk isn’t the intended sound. “A lot of people feel the ’60s. I feel more like the ’40s and ’30s with the choral arrangement and the hymnal stuff going on... more than this kind of ’60s folk vibe.”

“Someone said it’s like a medieval doo-wop,” Bear adds. “I thought that was kind of intriguing. I guess sometimes we like to sound like choir boys and sometimes we like to rock out. We can be a little all over the place.”

Bear grew up in the southwest Chicago suburb of Frankfort, and like other suburban kids, would sneak off to the city for kicks. He attended shows at the Fireside and played in bands, but soon departed for New York to pursue a jazz career. There, he found himself motivated more by rock’s contemporary sounds. “I started realizing that every time I went home from a class, the last thing I would put on was one of my jazz records,” Bear says. “Instead I’d put on Nirvana.”

Droste, meanwhile, was an untrained musician with no intention of forming a band. After his breakup he started tinkering around in his room using the audio and recording software Pro Tools. It was then that Droste wrote Horn, which is lyrically telling in its reveal of a gay relationship, unlike Yellow House.

“Horn of Plenty is the much gayer album, lyrically speaking,” Droste says. “There’s a lot of subtle references to gay stuff in there—it’s just hard to pick up on them unless you’re looking for it. Whereas in the new album, there’s not so much, actually.”

That suits Droste and his straight band members just fine. As Grizzly Bear furthers and fine-tunes its sound, he is happy to walk away from any sort of preconceived gay association.

“What is a gay sensibility, musically speaking, unless we’re going to dive into clichés and stereotypes?” Droste says. “I kind of feel like these days it’s just about the music. It just seems weird to me to put the sexuality over the music first.”

At this point, the quartet is focused on what it has now that it didn’t when Droste was tinkering around at home: a band. As a foursome, Grizzly Bear is looking forward to expanding its sound both in the studio and onstage.

“Just reinterpreting Horn of Plenty gave us an idea of what the band is,” Bear says of a highly acclaimed 2005 remix project for Horn that featured collaborations with electronic outfits like Efterklang, Dntel and Soft Pink Truth. “The driving force behind Yellow House was capturing this thing that Horn of Plenty doesn’t have at all, which is a band. As we continue playing and continue getting our live dynamic even tighter, I can see it going even further into this kind of, ‘What can four guys do at once?’ sort of thing.”

Droste agrees. But ask him if Grizzly Bear is ever mistaken to be a part of the Bear subculture and he’ll refute the notion. “[But] have you ever seen BearsGoneWild.com? They asked us to do a little guest post for them, so we did. You’ll have to check them out.”

Grizzly Bear opens for TV on the Radio Monday 9 at Metro.