Seabear, Mercury Lounge, NY

begin their show with the simple guitar strum and a buoyant violin melody of ‘Arms’, a song deep in their debut that was sorely overlooked upon its release. By foregrounding this stellar track the band remind their audience that the first album was more than just the single, ‘I Sink, I Swim’.

Leading with ‘Arms’, sets the tenor of the evening with its rustic swing. Though most of the band hails from Rejkevik, the they maintain a slightly rural sound which is due mainly to the primarily acoustic arrangements of ‘The Ghost That Carried Us Away’. However, Seabear have updated their sound interjecting the movement of their opening track with a warped country guitar line that doesn’t appear on the original recording.

The chronic stomp of the kick drum on ‘Lion Face Boy’ (one of the tracks from their new album ‘We Built A Fire’) adds a propulsion to the band’s sound that was not always present on their first record. With the immediate juxtaposition of new and old songs, it’s easy to see how the horns and stronger percussion flush out the band’s sound.

Crowd favorite ‘Cat Piano’ is incredibly faithful to the original recording and replicates the sweetness of the album version before the musicians begin playing ‘Fire Dies Down’, a song lead singer Sindri Már Sigfússon rightly, and wryly calls “a hoe-down barn song.”

As with their old songs, Seabear’s new material manages to keep the same flavor while keeping each song unique. Live, the musicians are better able to play with the dynamics of each song, beginning some as ballads and ending them as close to all out rock you can get with primarily acoustic instruments. From ‘I’ll Build You a Fire’ to encore ‘I Sing, I Swim’, Seabear continue to make country-inflected music played by people living at continual dusk.