The rest of the album... it sounded really nice, but it ran together at times and I have a similar issue with it as I do a lot of Grizzly Bear. It all sounds good, but just fails to make an impact due to solid-but unspectacular vocals and an over-reliance on slow, lush instrumentation. I intend to buy it and hope it grows on me.
hahaha so I finally sat down with the album properly (ie on a bed, lyric booklet, several drinks at hand) and I had completely forgotten I made this thread, so I was going to post in RMT but thought I'd do a search first, and I was going to make pretty much the same comment that I made here!!
It is a lush album, really quite lovely, but it's just not that inspiring. I still hold that "Palace" is one of the very best songs of the year, I wrote in my blog that it reminds me of The National, in the way that their best melancholic songs slowly build and swell to a beautiful climax. It mines similar lyrical themes to "Mistaken for Strangers" but differs from that track in that it offers a bit of hope at the end.
But the rest of the album just doesn't reach those heights for me. It is all one-paced, and yes, still reminds me of Grizzly Bear, another band who I would love to love but just can't, because that slow, stately music begins to lose its lustre when it continues for 45+ minutes.
I'm not big on Silberman's vocals, I love the moments when he lets loose, but they seem to come about once every 15 or so minutes, which is a shame. I found the lyrics to leave a lot to be desired. There are some odd allegories to be found on this record, and they seem to lack subtlety; Doppelganger, Intruders and Director in particular, and then you have quite a lot of lyrical content devoted to run-down houses, which wears a bit thin. The constant switching between regular and italic font in the lyric booklet suggests the lyrics are to be taken as prose or poetry, but I don't think many of the songs are strong enough lyrically to justify that. (Hotel in particular seemed a crap lyric.)
That all said I am a bit drunk and I'm probably just being "friggin cobbler". Aside from Palace, I will say that I really, really enjoyed Director and Refuge, but if I dig deeper into this band I hope to find records with a little more variety from all standpoints.