Disappears debut album, Lux, is out in April on Kranky.

Washington City Paper: How did you guys get started?

Brian Case: It was about two years. I used to play in band called 90 Day Men. We did a tour with a band called Boas, [which included] Graeme and Jonathan. On that tour we hung out a lot. We live in Chicago and we’re all friends. I’d always wanted to play with those guys. It came about that I was doing some songs and I wanted to record them. I did that with Graham and he ended up playing on the recordings. So, it fell into place that way. I just had guitar parts and some words, everybody else came along and added their thing.

WCP: There’s a minimalist quality to Disappears sound, what made you guys go in that direction?

Case: We were just trying to keep it simple, trying to strip away any of the gratuitousness. We were…some of the things we were pulling from, our touchstones, had a really simple approach.

WCP: What were those touchstones?

Case: I guess like Graeme and I talked about Spacemen 3 and Jesus and Mary Chain. We didn’t want to make songs that sounded like those bands, but their beginnings were so stripped down and rudimentary. That was something that interested us. I had never been in a band like that. I thought it would be cool.

WCP: Those two bands are frequently lumped into the psychedelic genre. Would you say there’s a psychedelic component in Disappears?

Case: Yeah, I think there is. The music has a real pulse, a heartbeat. There’s a lot of tension in it.

WCP: But that tag, psychedelic, it’s really ambiguous. It can refer to a lot of different music. In what sense would you say your band is psychedelic?

Case: It’s hard to say. Psychedelic can mean so many things. Some people would consider a band like Free Design psychedelic and some people would consider Hawkwind psychedelic, but those two sound nothing alike. Um…I don’t know what our contribution to psych lexicon is. Probably all the acid we do.

WCP: Is it sort of a live energy? You guys have some pretty good trance-out moment on this record.

Case: Yeah, I mean, the idea is to get something going. To get to where the music becomes physical almost. We call it the bliss-out part of the song–everything is going and its just happening. I don’t know how to describe it. You get the song to a point where the song feels like it’s circling in on itself. Things are changing and, but it’s not like there’s the big change, just subtle changes that you barely notice.

WCP: So how do you know when you’re really hitting that bliss-out point? When do you know the point is really getting across at a show?

Case: We’ve kind of just been trying to make it work for us. Hopefully people understand what we’re doing and are reacting to it in some way. If we’re on stage communicating well, then everybody can get in the zone. The music is kind of physical in this weird way—there’s lots of tension but no release. We don’t talk a lot to the crowd. We try to blast through the shows. It’s just one big wave.

WCP: You mentioned that the music has a lot of tension, what’s creating that tension?

Case: I guess it’s just the repetition. I know I keep coming back to that. It’s a really big part of it. When we’re playing a song and I’m playing the same chords the entire song it keeps falling back in on itself, it gets really trancey or something.

WCP: You guys have a full-length coming out soon, right?

Case: The record on Kranky comes out in April.

WCP: That label mostly caters to softer, looser, ambient artists. In what way do you feel like Disappears fits into that labels overall vibe?

Case: It was weird because it wasn’t…it was not the first place I had through we would end up. I like Kranky a lot, though. They’re so consistent. There’s not a lot of music on there that sounds the same as us, though. Maybe Deerhunter.

WCP: You guys are a little more overtly rocking than Tortoise. How has it been to tour with them?

Case: It’s been really fun. Living in Chicago, you take Tortoise for granted. It’s cool to be on tour with them and realize they’re so good. They’re a rock band at heart, but the records come across differently.

Grizzly Bear has caught some flack on this blog, but the jury was still out for me going into last night’s show. I bought Yellow House a few weeks ago, and while I had listened to it through a few times and found it intriguing (if not exactly catchy), I was not convinced enough to drop $9.99 on Veckatimest (or the other one, or the EP). It wasn't that Grizzly Bear's brand of wafting psychedelia turned me off; it was that after each listen I came away having absorbed nothing–not a single lyric, theme, or idea. I would listen again, straining to concentrate on the music, finding this impossible. For all its entrancing dynamics, the music just didn't have any handholds. I wanted to ride along, but it kept slipping away.

So as far as I was concerned, Grizzly Bear was on trial last night. The courtroom: The 9:30 Club, packed thick with an audience of breezy post-adolescents reveling in June's redefinition of Monday night.

Things did not start auspiciously. The opener, Here We Go Magic, confirmed my fears about how hypnotic, post-structural indie rock would play live to a hall full of people who seemed high on little but a glass and a half of Old Rasputin. With each song, Here We Go Magic appeared to follow the same protocol: Build a wall of sound, then drag it an arbitrary distance. Hearing these songs unfold was kind of like watching a wave gather itself without ever breaking. The full set, accordingly, felt like staring at the ocean.

Grizzly Bear came out strong, bathed in blue and violet stage lights. If Here We Go Magic was like watching the ocean, Grizzly Bear was like watching the ocean during a storm: bigger swells, more variegated, more dramatic, occasionally peaking with piercing guitar trills. The most impressive aspect of their sound by far was the vocal, which featured (primarily) three voices with three distinct timbres: Daniel Rossen's wood-solid tenor, Christopher Bear's quavering one, and Chris Taylor's soaring falsetto–the latter two benefiting from some serious reverb on the mic. Grizzly Bear definitely shares some alleles with Fleet Foxes in the post-Beach Boys lineage. But where Fleet Foxes's songs are grounded in folk music's inherent respect for structure, Grizzly Bear seems tethered by nothing at all.

Which, when you're trying to hold someone's attention for an hour and a half, is like fishing without a hook. Sure enough, after about 35 minutes I found myself glancing compulsively at my cell phone. Even in a storm, you can't stare at the ocean for too long without growing weary of its motion.