As I explained last week, this column will explore the favorite rainy day albums of a group of music-loving friends of mine. The first Rainy Day Album is the pick our very own GM, Max Tani: Grizzly Bear‰’s Yellow House.

Grizzly Bear‰’s first album as a four-piece, 2006‰’s Yellow House found the band exploring new frontiers of indie folk with a sound somewhere between Campfire Songs and Stravinsky. While they went on to record more popular/acclaimed albums boasting perfectly-constructed indie pop songs (particularly follow-up Veckatimest), Yellow House is their only album that feels like it really pushes (and obliterates) musical boundaries. Its songs feel more like pieces, with impossibly rich instrumentation, multiple sections, and exploratory chord changes and melodies foreign to simple folk music. Each of the ten tracks creates its own world and immerses you in it before disappearing into the next.

Opener “Easier‰” is a perfect display of the album‰’s otherworldy arrangements. The first moment of the album, it contains a wuthering flute section, a ghostly quasi-Classical piano, bright acoustic guitars, a plinking electric keyboard, a warm bed of banjo, descending glockenspiels, subtle drum flourishes and subdued, mysterious vocals.

As Yellow House progresses, it brings with it countless more sonic experiments. “Lullabye‰” moves from an appropriately somnolent acoustic piece to an amorphous wash of birdlike flute and autoharp, and then begins to build over an enigmatic refrain (“chin up, cheer up‰Û) to an ecstatic climax. The band‰’s four-part harmonies, which have since been refined into Beach Boy-esque melodic pop perfection, are used on songs like “Lullabye,‰” “Central And Remote‰” and “Little Brother‰” to build atmospheres of mystique around strange chords. “Marla‰” is a positively haunted death-waltz helped along by slippery string arrangements. “Reprise‰” furthers the uncanny feel with lonely, quiet banjo strums.

However, the best parts of Yellow House come at its climaxes. The album‰’s biggest moment is the end of the epic “On A Neck, On A Spit,‰” where a creepily sweet refrain in the song‰’s second half (“All my time spending with you, now‰Û) repeats until the song reaches a breathless 40-second stretch of keening mellotron, racing drums, chiming acoustic guitar, deep bass, and, yet again, those ghostly harmonies. Album-closer “Colorado‰” ventures even further, building a sweeping atmosphere around a reverb-laden piano until guitarist/singer Daniel Rossen‰’s slashing electric guitar cuts through Chris Bear‰’s darkly jazzy drum crashes, Chris Taylor‰’s dubby bass, distant guitar reverb and singer Ed Droste‰’s lonely “what now‰” mantra.

Chris Taylor‰’s production acumen borders on genius, with perfect amounts of space applied to the dozens of instrument tracks to create a sound that is fluid, lush, and vast. Yellow House‰’s hit and only ostensible pop song, “Knife,‰” showcases the production well, with swirling harmonies flowing around the song‰’s simple chords and melodies. Even on a basically catchy song like “Knife,‰” simple when it needs to be, sonic tricks and novel arrangements keep the sound exciting. In fact, the last minute-and-a-half of “Knife‰” abandons pop structure for Radiohead-esque ambience, with a muted piano‰’s distance contrasting the closeness of Bear‰’s near-tribal percussion.

This last moment of “Knife‰” also explains why Yellow House works so well as a Rainy Day Album. It gives a powerful impression of sitting inside, (possibly in a yellow haunted house), during a rainstorm. Certain sounds, particularly the drums and acoustic instruments, sound close and intimate, like a warm room of nearby furniture and comfort. But further out there are the larger elements: the louder sections suggesting raging squalls and thunderclouds, and the spacious production implying movements of the entire towering storm. Perhaps Yellow House‰’s most storm-like quality is its unpredictability; its propensity to be meditatively soft or crashingly loud, homespun or spiritual, immediate or distant, and often all on the same song. It is a self-contained universe and a perfect wonderland to get lost in when the storm keeps you inside.