Considering their name, Brooklyn address, and penchant for lo-fi campfire serenades, there's a powerful temptation to put Grizzly Bear in the same pen as those other charismatic megafauna, the Animal Collective, and be finished zookeeping for the night. But Horn of Plenty proves that categorization would be neither fair nor accurate. The gentlemen of Grizzly Bear paw around in wholly distinct regions of gentle, nocturnal psych-folk, conjuring visions of an imagined bedroom collaboration between the Doug Yule-era Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, and a pajama-clad Pooh with his head jammed in a honey jar.

Originally conceived by multi-talented singer-songwriter Edward Droste as solo demos, the recordings that became Horn of Plenty were later augmented by the additional vocals and instrumentation of Christopher Bear, and after hearing the off-handed cohesion of the duo's dreamy harmonies and their seemingly effortless musical interplay it's difficult to imagine these songs achieving such heights of hushed majesty in any other format. And the extra set of hands ensures the flow of enough fresh oxygen to allow the album to avoid complete descent into the troubled, myopic solitude of such similarly toned homespun constructions as Skip Spence's Oar or Syd Barrett's The Madcap Laughs.

The album opens with the appropriately submerged sounds of "Deep Sea Diver", which gradually climbs through currents of chiming, bell-like keys and guitars before finally surfacing into golden falsetto rays of sunlight. "Disappearing Act" marries its autumnal folk choruses to gauzy smears of vinyl hiss, handbells, and remote martial snares, while the clattering pocket symphony of "Showcase" eventually dissolves into the wordless vocalizing of felines on distant fire escapes. On nearly every track a previously unheard element, such as the mournful violin that shivers up the spine of "Eavesdropping", makes a brief spectral appearance before once again vanishing, leaving the listener to wonder at what hidden treasures further scrutiny might unearth.

Given the heady depth of Horn of Plenty's hazy musical swoon, Grizzly Bear's lyrics somewhat surprisingly strike a pleasant counterbalance by residing more often than not in the familiar realm of day-to-day reality. It's not unusual to hear Droste and Bear singing relatively mundane pronouncements like "My chest hurts a lot tonight" or "It's amazing I can still sing this song so simply about you," with such matter-of-fact nonchalance that as a result these songs collectively sound as unforced and natural as a series of quiet exhalations, capable of transferring the beguiling, intoxicating atmospheres of Grizzly Bear's bedroom directly into your own.