Seattle Subsonic

The Grizzly Bear Film

October 19th, 2009

Watching Grizzly Bear perform Friday night was a bit like the experience of watching a dramatic film. A visually stunning, beautifully crafted, uniquely intricate film. First, you had the audience, watching intently from the shabby Moore Theatre confines and hanging on every breath of the players. Secondly, you had the hypnotic lighting backdrop—made up of Mason jar-looking devices hanging from T-shaped scaffolds—captivating and enticing the rods and cones of every human eye present. I really can’t stress enough how much pleasure this added to the overall show. The firefly lights flickered, bounced, beamed and floated with almost every beat, and when combined with the overhead lighting and smoke machine, resembled either a red hellish underworld, a vibrantly green fantasy forest, a purple and orange nod to the season, or a bright blast of illuminating white light. Third, you had the irregular plot lines framed by the ever-so-esoteric lyricism of Daniel Rossen and Ed Droste, both of whom use an Expressionist’s hand to paint their stirring stories of heartbreak, awakenings, and everyday life.

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And, finally, you had the “actors”. One of the boons of watching this band live, especially in regard to the two primary songwriters, is how Rossen and Droste perform with and around each other. Their voices are both complementary and exclusive of each other, which, as a listener, I appreciate because such a duality is often inaudible or incomprehensible from other combos. Droste’s is a rich, resonant tenor with a stately elegance and an impressive range, while Rossen’s has more of a grave, understated feathery-ness to it.

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Of course, bassist/multi-instrumentalist/producer Chris Taylor and drummer Christopher Bear contribute much to the Brooklyn band’s musical fabric. Taylor, a native Seattleite, was also a one-man horn section this night, and the effects on his mic were ghostly and weird. Bear is not your typical drummer, and paints his own picture with a stuttered cadence that can be either plodding or primal. The ‘aww shucks’ moment of the night came when Taylor revealed his childhood girlfriend was in the audience, and the band proceeded to dedicate the next song—”Deep Blue Sea” from the Friend EP—to the entire town. The guys seemed to genuinely like the place.

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As for the music, it was about a choice as you would’ve drawn it up (though I’ll take a moment to complain about the sound system at the Moore: it…wasn’t good.) The set was a good 16 songs deep, and wavered mostly between Yellow House‘s most popular tracks and nine from Veckatimest. Like many of their songs, the intensity increased as the show wore on. My favorites were “Fine For Now”, with Bear’s timpani mallets setting the tone for Rossen’s cry of “If it’s all or nothing!”; “Ready, Able” and its unparalleled, rumbling dynamism; “I Live With You” which they surprisingly built up like a bombastic rock opera, and “On A Neck, On A Spit”, its pleasant folk rollick ending the pre-encore set. On the flip side, “Two Weeks” didn’t sound as quite as poignant as I had hoped and “Cheerleader” wasn’t given any drastic makeovers (not that it needs any).

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The quartet returned after a raucous encore call, making the ending a happy one with their cover of “He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)” by the Crystals (1962) from the Friend EP.