Grizzly Bear- Painted Ruins USA Tour

One of the exciting things about being home was being able to catch Grizzly Bear play the second of their two shows at The Warfield in San Francisco in support of their latest album Painted Ruins. As the band have yet to tour the album in Australia this was my first opportunity to get to hear many of these songs live. Gabby joined me for the evening, and we arrived as the stage was getting set up with some lovely cloud like backdrops hanging from the rafters.

The band came out onto the stage to big applause and launched into "Four Cypresses." They ended up playing a lot of my favorite tracks off their albums throughout the night, including "Mourning Sound" "Cut-Out" and "Neighbors" from Painted Ruins (unfortunately we didn't get "Aquarian" as it was only played at the first show), "Sleeping Ute" and "Yet Again" off of Shields, "Two Weeks" and "While You Wait For The Others" off of Veckatimest, and "On A Neck, On A Spit" from Yellow House.

It was an amazing live set and I am always impressed by how the band manage to recreate the complex layers of their album tracks live, both through harmonies and instruments. The lighting for the show also added a lot to the mood of the songs. Ed Droste and most of us in the crowd were in a celebratory mood with Doug Jones win over Roy Moore for the US Senate seat in Alabama (a little glimmer of hope in a dark year). For the encore they played the very early track "Shift" and then brought the house down with "Sun In Your Eyes" to finish. I'm looking forward to catching them again when they play Zoo Twilights in Melbourne in March 2018.

Here's the slightly NSFW video for "Mourning Sound"