Grizzly Bear at Radio City: Live photos (slide show)
The Brooklyn pop heroes played a blowout concert.
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
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Photograph: Virginia Rollison
A decade into its career, Brooklyn's Grizzly Bear has reached an enviable peak of swirling moods and musicianship, evident at its homecoming show at Radio City Music Hall on Monday night. (Between songs, the band had almost too many people to thank, including frontman Ed Droste's 91-year-old grandmother, who flew in from Texas.) The venue was perfect for the group's quiet-to-huge dynamic range. The guys kicked into churning, lusty guitar runs on their third number, the proggy "Sleeping Ute" (off their new LP, Shields), and later cooled down for harmonized lullabies like "All We Ask" and the whistling-heavy "Shift." On purely visual grounds, the fiercely focused quartet remains nothing much to look at, but a battery of hanging lanterns—rising and falling behind the players—proved hypnotic. The outer-borough crowd closed its eyes and swayed; it's hard to think that anyone came away disappointed after 15 songs, a lustily earned encore and the band's palpable sense of arrival. TONY photographer Virginia Rollison captured it all.
