Painted Ruins, Grizzly Bear’s fifth record and first in five years, sounds completely at ease with itself. The first few tracks teem with pastoral beauty; check the swooning, 70mm composition of “Three Rings” or the early-morning birdsong guitars of “Four Cypresses.” This has been a natural growth: The almost geological scale of 2006’s Yellow House gave way on 2009’s Veckatimest to lush, organic pastures, less focused on cathartic climaxes than ecosystems of detail, and it’s a development that continues here into a gleaming sonic opulence. Midway through, “Losing All Sense” clicks into one of the band’s wrangly, interlocking grooves, but augments it with enormous starbursts of guitar. On “Aquarian,” on the spidering “Glass Hillside,” on closer “Sky Took Hold,” the group repeatedly pulls out these reverb-drenched analog explosions of sound, offering a welcome reminder that few bands in contemporary music are as focused on the ...
