Rickshaw

SFJ describes the Grizzly Bear song (on Veckatimest) rather masterfully:

“Two Weeks” is a big fat ice-cream cone of a song. The piano part sounds a little like “Chopsticks” expanded into something more robust, with Bear merging a shuffle and a straightforward backbeat as the boys sing “Oh-ooh-oh” up into the air—a doo-wop quartet launching into orbit. Droste sings about a “routine malaise” but pledges, “I told you I would stay.”

“Chopsticks” or this? Sasha thinks Ed’s chorus is sweet, but I can easily read it, given the troubled relationship touched on throughout the song, as a sort of backpedaling. A lack of backbone in the face of an imposing lover, perhaps. Anyway, I wanted to take a look at different ways that this song has been translated into the music-video medium.

Very recently, Gabe Askew made a fan video for Grizzly Bear’s lovely “Two Weeks.”  Gabe’s interpretation: “A relationship where one person is uncertain of the others loyalty. You get sucked up into the daily grind and forget to tell the one you love how you feel. They get insecure and worry that you aren’t committed. ” Instead of taking a literal route, Gabe relies on a kind of cardboard diorama aesthetic, to craft a low-tech dreamworld populated by fish and highways and people that flip up from the ground or hang from the proscenium. We enter through a dark hole into what seems like a memory. Two guys make up the cast, mechanically pulling each other heart’s out, sharing sushi, suffering arrow-wounds, in this surreal drama of love in tatters, knitting itself back together.

Before Gabe’s, my favorite fan video trophy belonged to JT Helms, who spliced together chunks of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 La Ballon Rouge. (Digression: while in Providence with Chau, I had the good fortune to view Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s film inspired by Lamorisse’s classic. Binoche was brilliant as ever.) In this version, instead of a relationship between lovers, we have a boy and a mysterious balloon. When the song’s harmonies lift off into the sky, in a nice parallelism, so do the balloons. It kind of echoes the rise of the hot air balloons and anti-gravity flowers in Gabe’s video. Caught up in the sighing vocals, one can’t help but feel a sort of vertical motion of the spirit.

And finally the real one. A creepily poetic masterpiece from Patrick Daughters, the mind behind Feist’s videos. There is a tension in the song between beauty and darkness that is reflected indirectly in Daughters’ video. In the song it’s the ethereal voices vs. the subject matter. For the video, shot inside a “defunct boys’ penitentiary chapel outside of L.A,” it’s the serenely colorful interior vs. the pyrotechnics and digitally warped faces. It makes me think of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, uniting the strange and the familiar, as Daughters does here, in one emotionally unsettling vignette.

Which one’s your favorite?

This masterfully arranged Grizzly Bear track is wonderful on several levels. First, there are those ghostly vocals, which come from all four members, gently melding together their very different voices. You have Chris Taylor’s high notes, you have Ed’s lower register, which also seems to have a faraway quality. In particular, the wavering, wordless harmonies on the chorus pack in plenty emotion without leaning on language. Second, there is Christopher Bear’s understated drumming that, with nary a peep from the bass drum, whispers only on the upper frequencies, carrying that unbearable lightness even higher. Third, there are the great instruments: the Guild T-50 SB and the toy sampler Yamaha VSS-30. Fourth, the whole crazy architecture: the guitar’s flowing melody, the odd tuning, Dan’s chord changes.