By Sean Murphy

Like The Band four decades before them, the sound of Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear can be best categorized as an extemporaneous collusion of ecstatic tenacity. Lapidary strands of avant-noise, ramshackle folk, straightahead rock and just a tinge of Brian Wilson’s sweetly flowing harmonics congeal into a sound that is as inviting as it is dissociative, as richly luminous as it is hauntingly sparse.

Though consciously baroque, Grizzly Bear has yet to fall into the abyss of abstruseness that has (rather unfortunately) engulfed peers like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart. While backing Paul Simon during his celebrated BAM retrospective last year, the band suffused a contemporary and delightfully idiosyncratic feel into the singer-songwriter’s oeuvre without detracting from the power of his totemic songs, winning over the audience in the process.

And unlike their immediate progenitors in the local ‘indie’ scene, they have remained obstinately true to that oft-scapegoated label. Despite making the late-night TV rounds and opening for Radiohead on a leg of their tour last year, they have yet to cross over to radio. In this sense, they are pop stars in a fractured, postmodern way. Though commanding an international following and able to fill large concert halls, the blindsight rendered by “fame� and the other accoutrements of 70s-style stardom are noticeably absent. Call it Indie Crossover 2.0.

Much of Grizzly Bear’s playful orneriness stems from Ed Droste, the band’s affable frontman. Though openly gay, Droste neither flaunts his sexuality in the expected agitprop manner á la Sylvester or the Scissor Sisters nor wallows in the quizzical sea of doleful lust that so many of Stephen Merritt’s (The Magnetic Fields) songs inhabit. In a recent chat with INBrooklyn, Droste described the songs from 2006’s breakthrough Yellow House as “pleading mantras of love� and reiterated his intentions “to write for everyone, not just a gay audience, or this audience or that audience.

“You have to be inclusive [as a songwriter],� he added.

Although touring with Radiohead was “incredibly inspiring� on a personal level to Droste, any musical influences were minimal, as “most of the songs [for the band’s new album, due out May 26] had already been written by then,� he says. That said, the group’s “creative engines were just starting to turn on again� when they spent several weeks recording and working on songs at Allaire Studios in the bucolic environs of Shokan, N.Y., a stone’s throw from Woodstock in the Catskill Mountains.

“We tried to get it all done,� Droste says, “but more work was needed.� After further sessions, it became clear that the resulting album would be as different from Yellow House, as that album was from the group’s debut, which amounted to a Droste solo effort.

“Actually, it’s a pretty interesting step forward,� he reflects. “The drums are really on display here, while the vocals are not as hazy or dreamy and the lyrics are more explicit… the songs are more dynamic.�

It’s a sound indebted to relatively undocumented live iteration of the band, a sound that can be previewed in full splendor at BAM on Feb. 28, where Grizzly Bear will be backed by the stalwart experimentalists of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra. Although this is not their first attempt at playing in this configuration, having attempted a similar performance with the L.A. Philharmonic last year, Droste is excited to be on his home turf.

“We’ve picked some pieces for them to play,� he says.

As something of an elder statesman of the Brooklyn scene (at the very wizened age of 30, no less), where does Droste see things headed? Although “excited about where things are,� Droste—who is an active blogger, provoking a minor imbroglio late last year when he unwittingly posted a leaked track from Animal Collective’s much—anticipated Merriweather Post Pavilion-is equivocal in his praise of the blogosphere, citing its mystifying� elements and going so far as to compare it to high school.

“Because of all of that, you’re probably going to see less ‘supergroups,’ less of the red-hot popular bands—the REMs, the Radioheads—at least in indie rock, I think. I mean, you’re always going to have Beyonces and very singular figures in R&B.

“But anyway, things are just going at more of a pace, which is cool.� An assessment one couldn’t agree with more.

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