Grizzly Bear's best songs are the ones that sound untethered to time and space. And, wouldn't you know it, that pretty much describes most of the Brooklyn indie-rock band's short but compelling discography.
There's often a disconnect, however, between the quintet's recorded music and how it's rendered in concert. The trick has always been how can Grizzly Bear artfully re-create its songs - at once epic and evocative, shifting and shimmering like splashes of color in a kaleidoscope - without all the studio magic. At a rapturous, sold-out performance at Berklee Performance Center Wednesday night, the band deftly churned out carbon copies of the original versions while giving them extra room to breathe.
Grizzly Bear is touring behind a stunning new album, "Veckatimest," which, despite its dreamlike lushness, can easily elude the casual listener. It's tough to penetrate the persistent sheen that coats the songs, but at Berklee the band made them tangible with crackling and crisp instrumentation, especially on "Southern Point" and "While You Wait for the Others." Older track "On a Neck, on a Spit" charged to life with a blistering collision of guitar and bass, and "Fix It" took unexpected detours into psychedelia.
Even though the entire band often chimes in, sounding like the Beach Boys drunk on distortion, Grizzly Bear hinges on the vocal prowess of two lead singers with distinct styles. With a slight tremolo and catch in his throat, Daniel Rossen tends to ground the songs with an emotional directness. That leaves Ed Droste, who grew up in Watertown and thanked his family and friends in the crowd, to hover in the stratosphere with his ghostly falsetto resonating through dense layers of reverb.
Together, Rossen and Droste made a strangely affecting pair, aided by bassist Chris Taylor, who occasionally switched to clarinet, oboe, and flute. Drummer Christopher Bear often pierced the enveloping haze with a thwack of the hi-hats. Rossen's guitar playing, in particular, sounded indebted to 1960s pop, and that sensibility came full circle with an encore of "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)," made famous by the Crystals, one of Phil Spector's girl-group proteges. With a luxuriant and deliberate delivery, Droste sang the song as if he had written it, fully engrossed in its contradictory pathos.
It was the perfect continuation of the transfixing opening set from fellow Brooklyn indie rockers Here We Go Magic. Like Droste and Rossen, lead singer (and Salem native) Luke Temple took particular care with his swooning croon, backed by bandmates in love more with the musical journey than the final destination.
James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com. 
