8 January 2009 :: impeccable

:: Concert-Review /⊙ Features Home

It's Wednesday at the Troubadour and a sold-out crowd is watching Foreign Born play an anthemic, U2-aping set. I'm trying to describe Grizzly Bear, the night's headlining act, to my girlfriend. "They're folk," I start to say, trying to find the words to capture the band's mess of forceful noise and pastoral splendor. "But not freak-folk." Luckily enough, Devendra Banhart is standing against the wall just to the right of us. "It's Devendra!" I hiss, barely discretely enough. My girlfriend doesn't know who that is. The next day, Ed Droste -- one of Grizzly Bear's two singer/guitarists, and the one who handles most of the monosyllabic oh's and ah's -- tells me that Jenny Lewis and Van Dyke Parks were at the show, too. It's hard to know who has more indie cred these days. Probably Devendra.

Celebrities!: it was a big night for the band, and they rose to the occasion. For Dan Rossen, the band's other singer/guitarist and the one who handles of the more complicated guitar bits, it was a homecoming performance attended by his parents. At just over an hour, the band's set was on the short side, but it was more than enough time to demonstrate their range. While the album versions of the songs from Yellow House (2006) are subdued, sepia-toned scenes, in performance the band threw much of the pastoral stuff out the window. Relegated to the background on much of the album, drummer Christopher Bear's upfront percussion gave "Colorado" a freewheeling swing feel. On what the band described as a "new-ish" untitled electric workout, his dinosaur stomps kept the song from veering into noise jam territory. The band was heavy without being ferocious, loud without being particularly aggressive about it -- speaking softly and carrying big drumsticks. During a particularly long instrumental segment, the band's droning melodies did begin to drag on, but otherwise its hypnotic spell went unbroken. The group closed with a pristine version of "On a Neck, On a Spit" and left the stage, encore be damned.

Dirty and hung over the next day, the band played to a sizeable crowd at UCLA's Kerckhoff Grand Salon. One of several UCLA concert venues (and the one with the best acoustics), the Salon has high ceilings and plenty of natural light, qualities which lent themselves well to a quieter 45-minute set. The band went on a few minutes after noon without a sound check. Bassist Chris Taylor spent the show's first half on his hands and knees, playing woodwinds into a strangely placed microphone; he had no trouble playing bass standing up, and nobody seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. Just as well. The audience was too busy listening to Droste, whose imposing figure and outgoing personality played off of the more reserved Rossen. Droste asked the audience at one point if we were ditching class to be there -- half of us raised our hands, and the rest were probably on their lunch break. With drumming that pulled its punches in the churchlike room, the songs were left mainly in the capable hands of the two frontmen, who turned in note-perfect renditions of "Knife," "On a Neck, On a Spit" and a ghostly cover of the Crystal's "He Hit Me (and it Felt Like a Kiss)," among others. "Knife," perhaps the band's signature song, sounds like Phil Spector; "He Hit Me" is the genuine article, but Grizzly Bear sounded better doing its own material.

Having seen the band perform three times now, it's safe to say that Yellow House isn't a one-off or even the work of a successful studio band. The men of Grizzly Bear are craftsmen, and their band is a continual work in progress. In a sense, they haven't mastered the art of the live performance, but why hone the songs when you can restructure them completely? As evidenced by these shows and the band's various acoustic radio gigs, its music is meant to be taken apart and put back together like so many Legos. Jenny, Devendra, Van Dyke and I can only wonder what they'll come up with next.

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