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“I wanted to mix a record for Dirty Projectors, for Grizzly Bear, and for Twin Shadow.” “My goals this year were very, very specific,” he says. But when he laughs – which is often in this conversation – his face is convivial, nearly cherubic. He has deep-set eyes and a prominent brow that can make him look almost brooding whenever his expression is neutral. It’s a hot August day around noon, and Taylor sits in a loose-fitting tank top. The two have decided to meet up for an interview in Brauer’s home away from the city, in the Catskills region of upstate New York. The fact that the whole kitchen sink can be present and it can still all make sense to the ear, I think that’s an awesome thing to achieve.” “On this record, there are some of the most minimal moments we’ve ever had, and some of the most maximalist as well. “That’s my favorite thing about the results from these mixes,” Grizzly Bear’s bassist/producer Chris Taylor tells me. What’s perhaps most impressive about Shields is how much it breathes, and how, in its most dense moments of frenzy, each instrument maintains such clarity and space without losing any of its grit, or its rough, natural edges. This not to say that the album was mixed without care or craft - Far from it. Initially, I was surprised that an engineer with Brauer’s background signed off on them.īut he did, and in doing so, Brauer managed to get by without triggering the greatest fear that artists like Grizzly Bear tend to have in regards to teaming up with a seasoned professional: Namely, Brauer managed to avoid overworking their music, whitewashing it of their personality, or shoehorning their sound into a preordained aesthetic frame. I imagine that we’ll hear more and more of these 60s-psychedelia-inspired textures on mainstream releases in coming years, but for now, it takes balls for a “name” mixer to leave sounds this raw, this bare and home-brewed. These are the kinds of sounds that tend not to have a place on major releases these days, but the band goes for them with abandon. On “Yet Again,” one of the strongest songs on the album, a kick drum throbs like a muted heartbeat, and cymbals slosh and swirl as if through a veil of molasses.
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But on Shields, there’s no doubt that the group and their mixer are fully aware of what ‘normal’ records sound like, and how to get there. It could be argued that some of the unique sonic character on Grizzly Bear’s earliest releases, Horn of Plenty and Yellow House, came thanks to a degree of technical naïveté. Instead, what the band has delivered is its most organic, and at times, its rawest release since their debut in 2004.ĭuring an age in which the sound of music has become increasingly binary and homogenized, Shields is like a ripe heirloom tomato straight from the farmer’s market: Beautifully and uniquely warped on the outside, pregnant with depth and flavor within.įrom the first moments of the album’s opener, “Sleeping Ute,” and its garage-y, decidedly unfinished-sounding drums, Grizzly Bear and Brauer seem to scoff at expected sounds and textures throughout the entirety of Shields.
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When Grizzly Bear hired Brauer to put the finishing touches on their latest release, I expected what anyone else might: A few healthy coats of gloss and shine, along with a general slickening of the group’s sound. He’s even become something of a godfather for an entire style of mixing known as the “multi-bus” approach.
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The sound of Shields is the last thing you’d expect from a collaboration between the abstract indie rockers Grizzly Bear and a mainstream mixer like Michael Brauer.Īlthough he’s not well-known outside of the record industry, Brauer is famous within the studio world for having one of the dozen or so names that seem to appear on every other breakthrough release from the major labels.