If there was any proof needed of Grizzly Bear’s place up at the top of the heap of modern music, it’s the way Friend manages to not only completely update the group’s sound from last year’s brilliant Yellow House, but also in how it gets past its weakest moments and still attains truly necessary status.

Bad news first: the three grouped covers of Grizzly Bear songs — performed by CSS, Band of Horses and Atlas Sound — are rather uniformly underwhelming, verging on downright terrible. For what they do to “Plans” alone, Band of Horses should never be taken seriously again.

But when Grizzly Bear themselves stay in the spotlight, the results are downright incredible — a blend of Beach Boys-style harmonies, guitar jams verging on the psychedelic and a sense of structure and arrangement matched by very few other acts. “Little Brother (Electric)” rips the lid off of one of Yellow House’s high-points, a near-total re-write that not only elevates the tune into an altogether different stratosphere, but does the same for the band itself. Both “Shift (Alternate Version)” and “Alligator (Choir Version)” update and expand tunes from the lo-fi debut Horn of Plenty, a world apart from their bare-bones origins. And while it seems an easy target, the impassioned reading of The Crystal’s infamous “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss”’ is pulled off effortlessly.

How often does an odds-and-sods collection, half of which is admittedly rather piss-poor (albeit none of it by the band whose name is on the CD label), still manage to emerge as an essential piece of an already incredible discography? Pretty much never — and for that, Friend sticks out.