The quartet’s understandable nervousness showed less during the unveiling of new material; tracks “Four Cypresses,” and “Losing All Sense,” they conducted with the poise that spreads all over Painted Ruins. It was during the renditions of Shields’ “Yet Again,” and “Speak in Rounds,” where the band exerted their nervousness, thrashing into the tracks’ chaotic second halves. I found particularly satisfying, Christopher Bear’s frenzied enrapture, as he struck his drumset, his butt lifting from its stool as the songs progressed.
With Christopher Taylor on bass at the stage’s opposite end, a trembling tone rattled into the audience. Encased by the rhythm-section, singer-instrumentalist Ed Droste and guitarist Daniel Rossen got drowned out. I often hear Rossen’s needlework guitar acting as a wedge for the band’s more jagged textures, their blunt force. The performance’s bass-heaviness sounded like an inversion, one which left me wanting.
Breaking out a few Veckatimest numbers towards the middle, “Fine for Now,” and “Ready Able,” the band found greater balance, which continued with a rich, eerie rendition of “Knife”--disappointingly the only Yellow House performance. It was during “Sleeping Ute,” that the band proved their steadiness, matching the track’s slamming impact with its complex melodicism. During the coda, four white lights beamed behind the band, as Rossen unspooled the guitar, sung his mysterious personal-pastoral lyrics, and the others harmonized hauntingly. In that moment, looking like illuminated pillars, the band resembled the chorus to a Greek tragedy. Classical has always applied to Grizzly Bear musically, but for the first time, I saw their dwellings in antiquity.
Mounted over the stage, the yellow-painted faces of Tragedy and Comedy, started looking similar to each other. I noticed this most during, “Two Weeks,” where the audience clapped most excitedly. How fitting that their greatest hit--their “Creep”--is an nauseatingly cheery tune of “routine malaise.” Before striding out the classic piano bounce, they scoffed that this next song was brand new.
It was a true debut--that of “Systole,” where Christopher Taylor sang of a room on fire and--what I heard as--“A chance to get out of the water,” that I recognized Grizzly Bear’s channeling of the elements. They shimmer like fire, or its light reflecting on water; they float and glide like air, grind like earth. The lyric sheet in fact proves the line, “Try giving me a chance to get out/ I want it.” Of course, Grizzly Bear have always thrived by misleading their listeners. I think again of Comedy’s wincing shut eyes, its teeth-bearing smile; Tragedy wore an expression of solemn serenity.
A jagged triangle of crumpled grey paper occupied 3/8 the back wall behind the band. The gnrarled textures resembled those in Chyrum Lambert’s cover paintings for Painted Ruins. In its stillness and opaqueness, the spare backdrop suggested a cliff-side. In that I detected Painted Ruins’ meditation on transience as its own state of endurance. On the set opener, “Four Cypresses,” Rossen sang with resolve, "It's chaos, but it works." Just as on the album, the line sweeps over a marching beat resolutely, neither an affirming nor lamenting. Such wearied neutrality I read in the faces that emerged melting in and out of the rock-paper backdrop.
(W)Ringing expression from the stone, the set closing trio began with a stirring and sparse rendition of Veckatimest closer, “Foreground,” featuring Chris Taylor’s stirring clarinet. They followed with the live debut of the bobbing whir of “Three Rings”--the first song released from Painted Ruins. They closed with the searing jag, “While You Wait for the Others,” where every dragged beat, every stuttering, scissoring guitar break kept the audience jerking forward for more.
The house-lights illuminated a crowd surprised to even receive the suggestion that Grizzly Bear may not return. After the first minute of clapping, the overheads shut back off. In the second minute, the red stage lights gently brightened against the back black wall. It was in the third minute that I realized my clapping hit fou-four rhythm; the insistent woo-ings seemed to circle on every beat. My suspicion was confirmed in minute four when the audience broke into a steady stomp; it was as if the band’s music had infected us, and we were now exhibiting its symptoms. In the fifth minute, as our rhythm quickened, our shrieks creschendoed, that the band returned, a look of modest appreciation on each of their phase.
“Shift,” was a pleasant sureprise, especially with the band whistling in harmony over Droste’s singing. It was Shields’ closer “Sun in Your Eyes,”--Grizzly Bear’s “Morning Dew,” that truly brought me to my knees. Its pulsing piano intro, lured us into the track’s soaring catharsis, a moment of release which reminded me why I go to concerts in the first place.