Grizzly Bear, Brixton Academy, London

Having not played a London show since 2010, it’s pretty impressive how Grizzly Bear have managed to sell out the O2 Brixton Academy tonight. The recent radio and TV coverage would have helped, and it certainly didn’t hurt that the support band tonight is Villagers, the brainchild of Irish Ivor Novello-winning songwriter Conor J. O’Brien.

Bathed in blue light, O’Brien and his band run through material from their excellent 2010 debut album ‘Becoming A Jackal’ as well as from upcoming record ” due in January. The whole band are devastatingly dynamic and sublime; whether it be the intimacy of opener ‘Set The Tigers Free’ or the ruthless ending to new single ‘The Waves’, O’Brien has the audience hanging onto his every word, movement and action.

As they end with a new track, ‘Earthly Pleasure’, the venue seems full to the rafters, and this is before the changeover for Grizzly Bear has even begun.

Fast-forward 40 minutes. After a welcome from the audience that half of Sheffield would have heard due to its volume, Grizzly Bear take to the stage and open with ‘Speak in Rounds’. It’s a modest opener, but one that begins to make total sense.

As ‘Adelma’ begins, essentially a prolonged ending to ‘Speak In Rounds’ consisting of guitar-feedback and lo-fi bleeps, around 20 eerie-looking lanterns slowly rise from the stage behind the band, taking the atmospheric soundscape to a whole new level. These lanterns dive, sway and rise again throughout the show, a fitting and great visual touch to mark what is their biggest London show to date. Consequently, it is also band member Ed Droste’s birthday, and the whole of Brixton Academy sings ‘Happy Birthday’ in unison after the fourth song ‘Cheerleader’, a gesture that Droste is evidently touched by.

As they play through a perfectly chosen set-list consisting mostly of material from their last three albums, it’s hard not to notice the mesmerising attention to detail Grizzly Bear put into their live show. At one point Chris Taylor gets to his knees and plays a flute that is looped over and over again, something that is almost inaudible until the song breaks down near the end and the puzzle pieces fall into place. Meanwhile, Daniel Rossen is switching between guitar, piano and vocals so rapidly that the human eye can barely keep up.

The setlist sounds extremely cohesive despite coming from numerous different albums; even ‘Shift’ from 2004’s ‘Horn Of Plenty’ sounds seamless going into ‘A Simple Answer’, taken from ‘Shields’.

After playing a pounding version of their biggest hit ‘Two Weeks’ followed by a note-perfect rendition of ‘Gun-Shy’, the band end their set with ‘Shields’ album closer, ‘Sun In Your Eyes’. The kind of track that most bands would kill to write just once in their career, it’s no wonder that the band decided to save it until the very last song.

That is until they come back on to perform a three-song encore, the beautiful ‘Knife’, ‘On A Neck, On A Spit’ and an acoustic version of ‘All We Ask’, which manages to maintain a completely silent crowd for five minutes. The lanterns slowly descend from above, the last chord is strummed and Grizzly Bear leave the stage as modestly as they arrived, whilst around 5000 people leave the venue trying to comprehend the majesty of what they just witnessed. Maybe it isn’t a surprise that they managed to sell this place out after all.