The expanded edition of Grizzly Bear’s Shields tags a handful of unreleased songs and remixes on the back of the original album. Should you not need to purchase it all over again, you can also opt for a vinyl version with just the additional B-sides.
A handful of these unreleased tracks are taken from an unsuccessful session in Marfa (Texas), prior to the eventual, more fruitful recording of the album in Cape Cod and New York. Around 20 songs were recorded and aborted (with the exception of Shields singles Sleeping Ute and Gun-Shy), but the band have rescued three more songs that were considered worth sharing. Revealing a band slowly finding themselves, these are shifty, anxious-sounding works. The best of them is the quiet-to-loud release of Will Calls, but the finest song on this collection is the opening track, Smothering Green.
The remixes are a mixed bag. Nicolas Jaar’s reconstruction of Sleeping Ute is successful reinterpretation that retains that’s song’s desolate core and shrouds it in spidery electronic beats. Liars go for a looping, ambient version of A Simple Answer that trips itself up with a misjudged house beat two-thirds of the way through. Both of these remixes manage to capture the essence of the original band and add something of the remixer, but there’s little left of Grizzly Bear in Lindstrom’s Gun-Shy when he smothers it in inanely grinning doof doof. If you want more of the same, remixes by Dilpo (Will Calls) and Bonde de Rolle (Speak in Rounds) can be found online.
New, unreleased and re-envisioned songs aside, this release has given me a chance to really get to grips with a very strong album that I had yet to warm to in the same way I had Grizzly Bear’s previous two albums.
BY CHRIS GIRDLER
Best Track: Smothering Green
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: Friends GRIZZLY BEAR, Higher THE HORRORS
In A Word: B+
