Bear in Heaven

Ithaca is a small town, upstate, populated mostly by elderly hippies and sheltered college students. It’s not really the best market for last year’s buzzbands in the first place, and this show was also smack dab in the middle of midterms week. So it was a very, um, intimate show.

Oberhofer was the opener’s opener. The show started at nine, and there were maybe five people in the audience who weren’t affiliated with the tour. There was one drunk guy, a regular at the dive bar where all the shows in Ithaca are, who parked himself front and center and made a lot of eye contact with the lead singer, who looked like the youngest Jonas Brother. The bass player looked like he was my little brother’s age, and most of them weren’t even old enough to drink. I know, because I saw the bouncer mark them with “X’s” at the door. They were very enthusiastic, and sounded a lot like the Strokes, or the Hives, or any one of those early 2000s garage revival bands. They were cute and twee and so, so young. The guitarist played a toy glockenspiel. It was a short set, and the band soon joined the crowd to wait for Twin Sister to take the stage.

Twin Sister had a lot more shit to set up than the first band. Electronic-y shit. Probably synthesizers; I don’t know—they sounded like synths to me. And a keyboard, complete with requisite delightful keyboardist. The lead singer, Andrea Estella, did a lot of “cute girl in a band” posturing. She stood, pigeon toed, with a calculated air of awkwardness and refused to address the audience directly. She put on a baby voice and cooed about how cute Oberhofer was. The JoBro almost fainted. Their music, though, was kind of great: richly textured layers of sound, wall of noise style, with Estella’s weird breathy vocals floating in and out. The end of their set was especially strong. The audience had almost doubled by the time their set ended, and we were all pretty hyped for Bear in Heaven.

I, being a super pleb, was not very familiar with Bear in Heaven’s music, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard. They, too, played a very sonically lush set that sounded kind of like HEALTH, if Billy Corgan was the lead singer. The vocalist had a very enviable mustache. He was maybe the most ’70s looking bro in the bar that night, which is saying a lot since he had some steep competition. They put on a great show—that dude had a lot of charisma for man in the world’s lowest cut tank top, and I think they sounded better even than they do on their record. After they walked off stage, a lone drunk guy started a chant for an encore. The band looked amused and came out to play one last song.

All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Definitely better than studying.