Harmony on the Bowery

I suppose it was a reunion of sorts – my first show at the Bowery Ballroom since moving to New York last summer. That fall, I had seen Oslo’s Serena Maneesh act out their sordid heroin-chic-cum-psych-rock fantasies all over the Bowery stage. The bass player looked like Nico – but taller. She played three notes. Lead-singer and guitarist, Emil Nikolaisen, divided his time between wrestling with the scarves that kept getting tangled in his six-string and the guitar-player that kept rolling into his mic-stand. It was a great shambling mess, and not a bad show either.

Last Wednesday, I returned to the sold out Bowery to see Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear play the last show of their tour. The quartet was as tight as a Boeing’s cabin at 30,000 feet, and it was a phenomenal show. The boys play a technically ambitious brand of folk which they strap to the chromatic melodicism of a Danny Elfman film score. On records like last year’s beloved Yellow House, this comes off as lo-fi freak-folk experimentation with oodles of horns, tape loops, and found sounds burbling in the corners of their eerie tunes. One wondered how Grizzly Bear would ever pull it all off live. Their tour-capping gig at the Bowery certainly answered that question.

While Serena Maneesh looked like Burberry models checking themselves into rehab, the four mild-mannered guys in Grizzly Bear looked like boy scouts checking themselves into choir practice. And they sang like it too. At the Bowery, guitarist Daniel Rossen and multi-instrumentalist Ed Droste tossed off towering harmonies over a sea of reverb as easily as they could have tied a figure-eight not – which is precisely what Rossen did with his exquisite guitar-playing. In their sweaters and collars, the boys seemed as homey as your mother’s milk ’n’ cookies (which is not surprising given that they recorded Yellow House in the living room of Droste’s mom’s place just off Cape Cod), but they played like road-callused musicians. Grizzly Bear never let the inherently woozy material wander off course or the reverb drown out the pop hooks gleaming in each tune. We all stumbled into the frigid night humming and happy.