Grizzly Bear Takes a New Approach on Its Album "Shield" Phil Mansfield for The New York Times The indie band Grizzly Bear at the Allaire Studios in the Catskills: from left, Daniel Rossen, Christopher Bear, Edward Droste and Chris Taylor. Sizzle! And a streak of metallic-smelling smoke. It was a rehearsal mishap that could have been a lot worse. The Brooklyn indie-rock band Grizzly Bear had set up its menagerie of instruments, many of them vintage and temperamental, in one of the baronial parlors of Glen Tonche, a Catskill mountainside mansion here with a spectacular view of the silvery Ashokan Reservoir far below. It was a return visit: Grizzly Bear recorded and mixed its 2009 album, "Veckatimest," there, when the estate held the luxurious Allaire recording studios, and the mansion's owner invited the band back this summer to prepare for its fall tour. "We feel pretty lucky to be able to come here and rehearse," said Grizzly Bear's founder, Edward Droste. It sure beats the basements of Williamsburg. Actually, Grizzly Bear has largely left those basements behind. Its enthralling new release, "Shields" (Warp), is the fourth album in a steadily ascending career, ever since Mr. Droste released "Horn of Plenty," an album of songs recorded largely in his bedroom, as Grizzly Bear in 2004. Once he assembled a band in 2005, including a second main songwriter, Daniel Rossen, Grizzly Bear's music and audience steadily expanded. Categories fall short of describing Grizzly Bear's elaborate compositions, which can be as lapidary as chamber-pop, as delicate as folk fingerpicking, as vertiginous as psychedelia and, at times, as dynamic as arena-rock. The songs are both richly introspective and grandly scaled. It's music that put Grizzly Bear on tour, compatibly, with performers as different as Feist and Radiohead before becoming a headliner on its own, able to appear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with an orchestra, to draw Jay-Z and Beyoncé to an outdoor concert and to be commissioned to write a song for the soundtrack of ""The Twilight Saga: New Moon." The band is playing Radio City Music Hall on Sept. On that August afternoon in the Catskills Grizzly Bear was strategizing live versions of the complex, rhapsodic songs from "Shields." The band's rehearsal merged practice and problem-solving session, as Grizzly Bear decided how five people on a stage could reconstitute the album's kaleidoscopic textures. While tuning up for one song, Mr. Rossen observed: "We're having a really hard time making "A Simple Answer" sound good. It's too vanilla. We're trying to make it less vanilla. Each of the four band members and Grizzly Bear's touring keyboardist, Aaron Arntz, had his own nest of instruments, placed so they could switch among them mid-song, as they often did. There were assorted guitars, keyboards and effects pedals for Mr. Droste and Mr. Rossen; basses and reed instruments for Christopher Taylor; and trap drums, percussion and sampler for Christopher Bear. As they discussed distortion effects and keyboard tones, that sudden zap and sizzle came from Mr. Rossen's guitar. The top had been removed from a Wurlitzer electric piano to stop its buzzing, and the dangling tip of a guitar string had touched an open circuit, where the voltage was hot enough to vaporize the string instantly. With a different grip on the guitar Mr. Rossen could have been zapped as well. "That is a dangerous amount of current, if it melted metal," pronounced Mr. Taylor, who is also the band's producer and sometime instrument tweaker. You just had a brush with death. But with these musicians, alarm soon gave way to analysis. Mr. Taylor identified where the live contact was inside the Wurlitzer; obviously the top would have to go back on. Mr. Rossen inspected the guitar for damage, relieved that only one replaceable part had melted. Then he went off to find some wire clippers to cut back other dangling ends. Rehearsal resumed; there were many more nuances to tinker with. "Shields" is Grizzly Bear's fourth full album of impassioned musical enigmas: songs that take convoluted paths, musical and verbal, as they ponder the mysteries of simple human connection. "I live to see your face, and I hate to see you go/but I know no other way than straight on out the door," sings Daniel Rossen, the band's other main songwriter, in "Sleeping Ute," the eventful song - swaying, strumming, swirling, galloping, crashing, dissolving, shimmering with acoustic guitar and tapering away to a pensive croon, all in four-and-a-half minutes - that opens "Shields." "Shields" moves away from the dreamy, ooh-and-ah pop reveries Grizzly Bear constructed on previous albums. It is "a much more verbose album," Mr. Droste said, with considerably more care taken on lyrics. It's also the band's shortest album, with 10 songs in 48 minutes, and in some ways its leanest. The multilayered vocals that have been a Grizzly Bear trademark have often been peeled away to expose lone, aching, fallible lead voices. At times, in songs like "Yet Again" and "Gun-Shy," Grizzly Bear leans toward the clarity and melodic repetition of pop. But there's no move toward simplification in other songs that still embrace abstruse jazz harmonies, changeable meters and structures that can metamorphose in any direction, carried wherever a mood or melody might lead. Correction: September 16, 2012 An earlier version of this article misstated the name of Grizzly Bear's previous album. It is "Veckatimest," not "Vekatimest."