Bear In Heaven at the High Noon Saloon
If it wasn’t 2010 and the music world wasn’t totally imploding via iPod culture and blog hype, Monday’s joining of baroque folk (Mountain Man), dream-pop (Twin Sister), and arena-sized synth rock (Bear In Heaven) at the High Noon Saloon wouldn’t have made an ounce of fucking sense. We were certainly left scratching our heads when Mountain Man walked offstage from a set of Appalachian-inspired harmonies—that gathered a crowd seated on the floor around the stage—and Twin Sister emerged in sparkling headwear as keyboardist Udbhav Gupta flipped on his Yamaha DX7 synthesizer.
After the infectious crawl of Twin Sister’s set-opener “Lady Daydream,” we stopped questioning the evening’s sonic melting pot and simply learned to embrace it. The tiara-esque headpiece and breathy delivery of vocalist Andrea Estella added to the bands Quaalude-prom dreamscape, while the chorus-laden chords of Eric Cardona soaked in underneath. Cardona, a lefty, played his right-handed guitar upside down a lá Jimi Hendrix, which explained his acrobatic chord changes, but did not explain his tiny, salmon-pink shorts.
“All Around And Away We Go”—a sweet collision of Italian disco and the shoegazing of old Lush—found Gupta showering some stuttering synthlines and shimmering arpeggios onto the minimal rhythms of drummer Brian Ujueta. The Long Island quintet tiptoed through a set that pulled largely from the recently released Color Your Life EP, as well as 2008’s Vampires With Dreaming Kids EP before making way for Brooklyn’s Bear In Heaven and its fancy-pants light rig.
In the time between the end of Twin Sister’s set and the beginning of Bear In Heaven’s, the look of the stage went from that of a junior high school talent show to full arena-rock splendor. Of course, this isn’t to say that the smoke machine and intelligent lighting didn’t carry some extra umph to the tribal punch of set-opener “Beast In Peace,” a song that gave the crowd an opening taste of masterful, polyrhythmic hammerings of drummer Joe Stickney.
Bear In Heaven’s sound was oceanic for a three-piece. The melodic howls of mustachioed vocalist Jon Philpot swung through the room as he multi-tasked between a bass and two samplers, one of which he used like a synthesizer, rumbling out a monolithic backdrop for the guitar work of Adam Wills to fall upon. While most of the band’s set—which drew largely from last year’s excellent Beast Rest Forth Mouth—prominently featured danceable rhythms from Stickney, doom lurked around every corner, thanks to both Philpot and Wills’ crashing waves of quiet-loud dynamics and Stickney’s blurry appendages, which provided the illusion that a second percussionist was hiding underneath the stage. The trio wrapped up its set with a cover of Lindstrom & Christabelle’s “Lovesick,” before waving its goodbyes and dismounting the smoky stage.
