999,973: Grizzly Bear — Two Weeks

This Grizzly Bear album has been bugging me ever since it came out. The song Two Weeks was my favorite track of the summer, by a wide margin, and the rest of the album seems cut form the same cloth, yet this one song towers so far above the rest that it makes everything else seem lackluster by comparison. It's the curse of the standout track.

And what a standout track it is. With no apparent change to the band's trademark formula they create something that makes you completely forget that their sound is just a collection of carefully chosen musical affectations. The womanly crooning, the thick atmospherics, they're all here, but they buoy the song instead of concealing it or dragging it down. It's the perfect marriage of a song to it's high concept production.

Sometimes a song just stands out because it's the one pop track in amongst an album full of growers. Listen to one of these albums long enough and you former favorite starts to sound a little trite, and you find it replaced by new favorites every time you listen. Unfortunately for Grizzly Bear, while Two Weeks is certainly the poppiest song on the album, I've only gotten less patient with the rest of the album as time has gone on. To those songs I say, "Why can't you be more like Two Weeks?"