An afternoon with Grizzly Bear

Last sunday I had the pleasure to enjoy an amazing music-filled day in my new neighborhood (Williamsburg-Brooklyn). The city has been doing summer concerts every sunday called The Pool Parties, just a couple of blocks from where I live. The months of July and August were filled with 3 to 5 band sets in one amazing location overseeing the East River and Manhattan…Unfortunately, missed most of them.

The Pool Parties performances include bands like Dirty Projectors, The Black Lips, Deerhunter, Fiery Furnaces, Girl Talk and more. Grizzly Bear was the headliner for the end of the concert series and this time I couldn’t miss it for anything in the world. It was stunning to hear such a talented group of guys, all singing and switching instruments without any effort from clarinets and flutes to electronic ones and some instruments I couldn’t even recognize. I’ve always been a fan of their harmonies and the mix between electronic and traditional instruments so it was great to see how it is that they do it.

There were two more bands who I’ve never heard of but they were pretty cool, Vega and Beach House, Vega was more like a happy band from Texas, they reminded me a lot of Black Kids. Beach House was a good combination of a head singing girl with a beautiful voice, a good looking guy with experimental guitars and a drummer who just kept the beat. Overall I enjoyed their songs.

One of the highlights of Grizzly Bear’s performance was the song “Two Weeks” which is a very popular one, they brought out the girl from Beach House to do the harmonies while the sunset was reflecting rays on the stage, so the combination of a pink sky with the empire state building as the backdrop just made the whole experience almost surreal for a Miami girl who’s used to driving 2 hours north to hear the good music in an amphitheater overseeing a parking lot.

I realized this weekend that my little Samsung cell phone actually take decent pictures, check them out.