Exclusive Daily Download: “Marla,” Grizzly Bear
There’s something oddly diffuse about Grizzly Bear’s music, something ungraspable: I listened repeatedly to last year’s “Horn of Plenty” trying to pick a track to post here, loving it all every time, but was completely unable to focus in on any one track, or even a few frontrunners, until it eventually faded out of rotation and I just forgot. That’s not going to happen with “Yellow House,” which comes out Tuesday. The sounds are even lovelier on the new record than on its predecessor; there’s the same diaphanous haziness, emotionally and sonically, but with more of a structure underneath, something to really grab onto, and that added definition makes this a truly stunning album, one of the best I’ve heard this year. The song that really gets me is “Marla,” an exquisite, elegant waltz, redolent of faded memories, with the disorienting feeling of being lost in someone else’s dream, cluttered with references that you can’t comprehend.
— T.B.
Great literary podcasts:
“In Walked Bud”
Amiri Baraka
“The Last Days of the Suicide Kid”
Charles Bukowski
“The House on Mango Street”
Sandra Cisneros
“A Reporter’s Life,”
Walter Cronkite
“An Open Heart,” by The Dalai Lama
Read by Nicholas Vreeman
“Robert Frost Reads”
Robert Frost
“In Harry’s Bar in Venice”
Ernest Hemingway
“The War on Drugs”
Bill Hicks
“I Have a Dream”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“King of Horror”
Read by Stephen King
“Motherless Brooklyn,” by Jonathan Lethem
Read by Steve Buscemi
“Long Walk to Freedom,” by Nelson Mandela
Read by Danny Glover
“Shopgirl”
Steve Martin
“All the Pretty Horses,” by Cormac McCarthy
Read by Brad Pitt
“The Bluest Eye”
Toni Morrison
“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov
Read by Jeremy Irons
“The Bell Jar,”
Sylvia Plath
“The Raven,” by Edgar Allen Poe
Read by Basil Rathbone
“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” by JK Rowling
Read by Jim Dale
“Everything”
Henry Rollins
“Fast Food Nation,” By Eric Schlosser
Read by Rick Adamson
“Me Talk Pretty One Day”
David Sedaris
“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
Dylan Thomas
“Slaughterhouse Five”
Kurt Vonnegut
“Hooking Up”
Tom Wolfe
Audiofile logo by: Aris Blevins
