A Grizzly End

Brooklyn-based indie rock band Grizzly Bear has an eye-opening new music video to match their popularity. “Two Weeks,” from their latest album Veckatimest, the video begins deceptively simple enough with the four-member male group, looking peeking as they sit in the back of a church against pastel-colored stained-class windows and harmonizing in trademark fashion. But as their glossy, slow-motion heads toggle slightly and their eyes slightly bulge out from their sockets, it soon becomes clear we’re not among standard choirboys, but in the surreal realm of music-video director Patrick Daughters, known for his clips for Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps,” Feist’s “1234,” and more recently, Depeche Mode’s “Wrong.”

Running at just over four minutes long, the clip is packed with 68 special effect shots supplied by international wizards The Mill. Some of the visual manipulations are strangely imperceptible—the bands’ eyes were actually enlarged and cut together from different takes; other effects are more glaring, like glowing lights that emanate from their cheeks. Stay around for the luminescent climax, a showering of sparks that rivals the climax of The Natural, or to evoke a very different band, the iconic cover of Jane’s Addiction’s 1998 LP “Nothing Shocking.”

In a major profile of the band, The New Yorker‘s music critic Sasha Frere-Jones recently called the “Two Weeks” track “a big fat ice-cream cone of a song… with [drummer Christopher] 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.” With this video, it seems that space is the place.