You probably can't tell from album cover, but Grizzly Bear's home-recorded debut comes encased in soft black fur. It's cuddly and reassuring, but at the same time vaguely threatening. Whether it recalls a teddy bear's pelt or the matted winter hair of a dangerous animal, and whether it seems amusing or forced and pretentious, depends largely on what you bring to it. It's clear that Grizzly Bear has considered all of those elements -- not merely in their unusual album packaging, but in Horn of Plenty itself. There are sweet, wordless Animal Collective croons and spacy Black Foliage-like psychedelic harmonies. A bit of mysticism, a la Circulatory System, blows by on a breeze, only to be caught and anchored by odd percussion and quasi-identifiable real world sounds.

Grizzly Bear started with just Ed Droste, a Brooklyn-based singer and writer who laid down demos for Horn of Plenty's 14 songs in his apartment over a 15-month period. He was then joined by Christopher Bear, who added vocals, instruments and electronic sounds. Like many home-recorded CDs, this one feels a bit soft-focus and indistinct; the vocals are pressed right up against the glass, dominating the whole sound, yet remaining somewhat indefinite themselves. This adds to Horn of Plenty's otherworldly feel and its almost Brazilian softness, yet frustrates any attempt to pin the CD down. The result is warped and elusive folk music, with swooning, interlocking vocals, sunny simplicity floating on mysterious undertones.

Opener "Deep Sea Diver" begins with muffled, distorted voices -- filtered, perhaps, through a breathing tube, but interrupted by the guitar's more conventional steady strum. An ethereal chorus, its "Just keep it away..." more breathed than sung, dissolves into harmonies as light breaks through a prism into rainbows. There's a complete break, a big rock drumbeat, that transforms the track into a lo-fi anthem, then dies down into nothing. The entire song has a lovely philosophical remove to it, as if it really were being sung from the bottom of the sea to people who may or may not have forgotten all about the diver. A coda of picked guitars finishes the track calmly and beautifully.

Some of the most interesting tracks on Horn of Plenty mingle syncopated rhythms, tapped out on non-traditional instruments, with the dreamlike, intertwining vocals. "Shift"'s nostalgic piano chords and breathy vocals lead into a complicated clapping pattern, punctuating the serpentine melody in odd and unexpected ways. "Fix It", with its tool belt worth of hammering and sandpapering and finger-snaps, melds subject matter with sound in one of the disc's most compelling tracks. It is, like most of Horn of Plenty, about broken relationships, yet it whimsically overlays lyrics like "Nothing ever feels the same / Maybe you can fix that. I swear it was just a game / I have to fix that" with the sounds of more conventional "fixing".

Grizzly Bear is also quite good at the very simplest kinds of songs, the ones that combine a naked strummed guitar and a clutch of harmonized voices into an inescapable sense of mood and wholeness. "La Duchesse Anne" is one such track, with its sad shuffling guitar and wistful do-do do-do chorus. The song dies down with two voices echoing each other with a single melancholy lyric, tapping a well of regret and loneliness in five repeated words. The song is probably about something specific in Droste's life, but it's simple and universal enough that almost anyone hearing the "How good I've had it" ending will heave a sigh and think about the things that have gotten away.

The packaging is gimmicky, but the stuff inside is very real. Eccentric and beautiful, calm on the surface and disturbing underneath, Grizzly Bear's Horn of Plenty will fit nicely among recent records from Animal Collective and Panda Bear, Kelley Stoltz and Circulatory System... or at least it would if the fur didn't keep getting stuck in the carousel.