Grizzly Bear @ 9:30 Club
At the end of 2007, one of the blogosphere’s more ubiquitous concertgoers named Grizzly Bear his number one show of the year. Initially, this announcement prompted me to kick myself for using that particular set as a bathroom/lunch break at that year's Pitchfork Festival. However, as time passed, I started to question his judgment. Grizzly Bear’s breakout 2006 release, Yellow House‘s combination of stunning harmonies and instrumentation and tedious meandering makes it a difficult album to complete in one listening, and this year’s highly lauded Veckatimest seems like it would make the perfect soundtrack to the poppies scene in The Wizard of Oz. There’s a sense of enchantment, ethereal choral harmonies and a sinister undertone, but it’s also highly conducive to putting the listener to sleep. As such, I kept waiting for the moment during Grizzly Bear’s set where the show would lose my interest.
It never happened. Because while Grizzly Bear albums can be a little top-heavy with filler suitable only as background noise, there are enough songs within those albums that are flawlessly constructed and their choice of songs and staging highlighted the band’s considerable strengths. All four members of the band stood in a horizontal line in the front of the stage, allowing no nuance to be lost. Everything from the frenetic instrument switching of Chris Taylor (who played bass, flute and clarinet) to the choral nature of their four part harmonies was highlighted by their setup. And what harmonies they were. We’ve covered bands where all four members can sing, but not with the bell-like clarity of the gentlemen in Grizzly Bear.
Their surprising choices in set order also worked to their advantage. While most bands save their biggest hits for the encore or the set-ender, their biggest hit, the oft-covered ode to backstabbing “Knife,” came fourth in the set and current Veckatimest standout “Two Weeks” showed up two songs later. It’s a ballsy move for any band to make as playing the biggest crowd pleasers doesn’t usually leave much room for a growth in momentum. But the drumming of Christopher Bear which can occasionally get lost on the album, really enhanced songs like “Little Brother” and “While You Wait For the Others.” They also took cues from the tighter strong structure they used on Veckatimest and cut some of the less immediate instrumentation from Yellow House tracks like “On a Neck, On a Spit” and “Knife.”
The band also seemed to be enjoying themselves. When Ed Droste came onstage, he carried with him a tray of the cupcakes that the 9:30 Club debuted last week, handing them out to the lucky patrons in the front before starting the set with Veckatimest opener, "Southern Point." Even during the moodier points in their set, like the interminable yet incredible "Colorado," the band projected an energy, whether in Daniel Rossen's fierce fits of shredding or Droste's compliments toward the "positive spirits" of the audience.
The onstage energy was also a saving grace for Grizzly Bear’s opener, Here We Go Magic. When the band started its set, the people next to us had actually grabbed cups of coffee, and with good reason. Their woozy ventures into dense instrumentation initially sounded like The Besnard Lakes on valium. But as the set continued, it was clear how the full band enhanced the work of a solo recording. The vocals of Kristina Lieberson and Jennifer Turner (on bass and keyboards) added depth and the drumming added energy. By the time they finished off with “Tunnelvision,” the blank stares from the audience had become toe taps and head bobs as if to say, “Okay...maybe that wasn’t half bad!”
Grizzly Bear did more than that. After telling the audience that they weren't planning on doing an encore, the audience howled with such fervor that even though they could've ended with "On a Neck, On a Spit," and it would have been a perfect set, they came back to play vintage Grizzly Bear track, "He Hit Me." This broke the spell a little bit, only because of the loud off-beat clapper that drove the audience into a fit of laughter and Droste to do an exaggerated on-beat clap at the end of the song. Poor guy. But, jokes aside, Grizzly Bear's sonic grandeur was utterly effective in that an uninitiated patron and a previously underwhelmed fan talked outside the 9:30 Club about rethinking their opinion of Veckatimest. Maybe I should, too.