Live Review: Grizzly Bear

After over 100 shows in support of their album Shields, Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear finally finished off their world tour on Sunday at the Sydney Opera House. Treating a captivated audience to two hours of gentle lows and soaring highs amidst a background of floating, glowing lanterns, Grizzly Bear truly finished on a near magical high note.
Grizzly Bear is a band that over the past decade has successfully matured in their natural ability to create layers and spaces within their music, whether instrumentally or vocally. Speak In Rounds, a conglomerate of insistent strumming and tenacious drumming accompanying the duel vocals of Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen, set the scene for the night, with the band seamlessly then drifting from one absorbing track to the next. Sleeping Ute, one of the band's stand-out tracks from Shields, was an early gem in the set, with the delicacy of Rossen's solitary vocals woven into a hypnotic, circling guitar hook, topped off with mighty upsurges of crashing drums and guitars.
It's truly impressive to experience a band that can give as much weight to the splinters of silence within their songs as their sweeping, theatrical crescendos. Whether it be the echoed guitar reverbs on While You Wait For The Others or the delicate piano comedown on What's Wrong, Grizzly Bear have an innate ability to give even a whisper the strength of a scream. A stripped-down All We Ask, with Rossen on acoustic guitar and drummer Chris Bear tapping away on a bass drum, accompanied by Droste and Chris Taylor's duel vocals, provided the perfect end to a wonderful show, with both the vocals and Rossen's fingerpicking slowly dissipating into weighted silence.
Vocally, the band is known for their layered harmonies but it's another thing to hear them live, especially in such a peaceful setting. At points the band intricately spliced four sets of vocals together in some of the most impressive synchronisations in recent memory. Droste's lead vocals on Two Weeks were sustained throughout by soaring background harmonies that, alongside a distinctive piano riff, fleshed out the track instrumentally. Similarly Chris Taylor's outstandingly eccentric vocals on encore, Knife, outshone any instrumentals on the song. Due to the iconic setting, the night's proceedings had a very reserved feel (Droste noted that he was 'lost for words' more than once,) the crowd notably quiet and the onstage banter from the band replaced with a quiet 'thanks' at the end of every few songs. As those final notes on All We Ask gave way to absolute silence within the concert hall, it's no doubt that everyone present realised they had just experienced something truly magical.