Grizzly Bear > Feist

Last night at the Moore, in a “stars – they’re just like us!” moment, we spotted the sisters of Smoosh as well as Martha Plimpton. Of course, they were just part of the sold-out crowd for the strong double-bill of Grizzly Bear and Feist.

At this point, we’ve seen Grizzly Bear approximately nine million (ok, four) times, so we kinda know what to expect: the Brooklyn quartet will seem to be wearing the same outfits as the last time we saw them; they’ll start the set with Yellow House’s “Easier” and close with its “Reprise”; “Knife” will invariably be the highlight, due to Chris Taylor’s amazing feline falsetto; and we’ll always be impressed by the few tracks thrown in from their previous album Horn of Plenty, especially the slow-build of “Fix It.” However you want to classify the band’s sound---lo-fi indie electro? laid-back psych folk?---with their combination of dreamy four-part harmonies and varied instrumentation (autoharp, whistles, banjo, flute, recorder, laptop), the result is both haunting and sonically soothing. So it’s a shame that there was a smattering of static from a crackling speaker to break the reverie. Despite that minor annoyance, there are few bands that we recommend live more than Grizzly Bear.

It makes sense then that Canadian Leslie Feist, but one member of the spectacular Broken Social Scene collective, would want Grizzly Bear as an opener. After all, both acts share the melding of the old and the new, and Feist picked up where Grizzly Bear left off, beginning her set with vocal loops over The Reminder’s jazz-twinged electro-ballad “Honey Honey.” Her four-man backing band ran the gamut of instruments from xylophone to piano, melodica, even a full horn section on “Past to Present.” And call us cold, but we really weren’t feeling it. Don’t get us wrong: Feist has a full-bodied, smoky-sweet voice, and she’s written some great poppy love/love-lost songs, all of which were included in the set last night (“My Moon, My Man,” “I Feel It All,” and of course her biggest hit, “Mushaboom”). But she also struck us as being a bit too demanding (you require bird noises from the audience? really?) and not so much bitch crazy as bitch Difficult. Yes, the typically unresponsive Seattle crowd was stick-in-the-mud-ish, and yes, she’s the frontwoman and it’s her responsibility to get the crowd into it and keep her band on track. Still, her tactics (ranging from chiding to flat-out bribery) weren’t exactly charming and just rubbed us the wrong way; ultimately, we kinda like her better in album form.

Photo care of Michael Alan Goldberg.