Results tagged “herewegomagic”

              

The Walkmen provided some glimpses of the future on Tuesday night, playing a 17-song set to a pretty-full-but-not-sold-out 9:30 Club. However, if Tuesday's set served a as an indicator as to the band's songwriting direction, then they haven't quite made their mind up yet. The word "boozy" has been used to describe the band's sound in the past, but "boozy" only buys you a finite line of credit. The band's most recent work has showcased multiple divergent influences. 2006's A Hundred Miles Off brought in horns and a bit of punk rock, while 2008's You & Me brought a more soulful sound, making singer Hamilton Leithauser sound like an age-old indie-rock crooner.

         

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.

In March, we started hearing passing recommendations about a band out of New York called Here We Go Magic. Once you get past the awkward syntax, those recommendations add up. The woozy dream pop that songwriter Luke Temple says to have recorded in a "two month period of stream-of-consciousness recording" is perfect for post-work mental detox and an unsurprising choice as openers for the ethereal, meandering indie rockers Grizzly Bear. Here We Go Magic's self-titled debut finds Temple eschewing the falsetto that he'd used in his former work (which at times sounded an awful lot like Sufjan Stevens) for a more somber tone. Appropriate, considering that the first track, "Only Pieces", asks more existential questions, repeating the line, "What's the use in dying, dying?" The Grizzly Bear/Here We Go Magic bill reaches the 9:30 Club tonight, so we asked Temple a few questions about the evolution of Here We Go Magic from "stream-of-consciousness-recording" to five-piece band.