“You guys wanna dance for a couple of minutes?,” asked Morning Benders lead singer Chris Chu to a sold-out crowd at Music Hall of Williamsburg Saturday night.
It’s not the most obvious question you’d expect to hear from a band known more for shimmering pop and atmospheric guitars than pulsating rhythms, but tonight, the quartet supplemented the guitar-heavy sound of their latest album Big Echo with a swing only previously hinted at on record. The art-funk riff of “Promises,” which for Grizzly Bear fans is your new favorite song, needs to be sampled by some rapper ASAP. (It’s not coincidence the band came out to R. Kelly’s “Real Talk.”)
But for most of the 11-song set, culled from both the group’s debut Talking Through Tin Cans and Echo, the group’s mid-tempo, breezy rockers sounded like a more morose version of Spoon (At times, Chu is a dead ringer for Britt Daniel). The waltz-time of b-side “Go Grab A Stranger,” the first time the group has performed the track live, is the most haunting and head-nodding of the set, while “Wet Cement” exemplifies Chu’s soulful vocals.
But most noteworthy of the group is their ability to deftly shift from glimmering pop to evocative darkness to grinding guitars in the space of a few songs and not sound like a hot mess. They sound like the young kids that they are; a band that gloriously doesn’t know any limitations and nearly all of it works.
“Excuses,” which sounds like it should be playing in the background of a 1950s diner, opens Echo, yet fits better as the group’s set-closer tonight. With Chu leading the crowd in an a capella round of “da dums,” the track evokes both the band’s sunny Bay Area roots and devotion to classic pop before ending in a rousing and extended guitar breakdown. It’s a dichotomy that, on paper, shouldn’t work but sounds perfectly at home here.
Photo courtesy of Yamani Baker
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