Kevin Bronson on February 28th, 2011

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At one moment during Local Natives’ gleeful turn Saturday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, singer-keyboardist Kelcey Ayer gazed longingly at the grand piano in front of him, which seemed not much smaller than a lot of clubs the Los Angeles quintet played during its two-year ascent into the indie-pop limelight.

“This is the first time I get to play a real piano live,” Ayer said, giving the grand a big man-hug as the capacity crowd laughed. Then he turned to the modest electronic keyboard at the front of the stage and added, “I hate that thing!”

||| Photos by Laurie Scavo

Local Natives’ 90-minute concert was all about size: Sure, Ayer and bandmates Taylor Rice, Ryan Hahn, Andy Hamm and Matt Frazier brought a can’t-believe-we’re-here exuberance to the 2,265-seat home of the L.A. Philharmonic, but with only one album’s worth of material (plus a cover song), the venture could have been like launching a balsa-wood airplane on an LAX runway.

That they achieved liftoff owed mostly to their meticulously practiced three- and four-part harmonies, which seemed to float cloud-like in the acoustically perfect hall. Those vocals, along with the mix of punk and Afro beats, serve as the calling card on the band’s 2009 debut “Gorilla Manor,” and atop the orchestral arrangements composed by Neel Hammond (of the Sonus Quartet), they sounded ethereal.

Local Natives’ first set, performed with the backing of string quartet, threatened to bog down early. Album (and show) opener “Wide Eyes” was dangerously genteel, and the quintet’s cover of the Talking Heads’ “Warning Sign” – famously turned inside out on “Gorilla Manor” – turned into choral molasses here. But the band was just warming up: The stealthy beats of “Cards and Quarters” and the frisky “Sticky Thread” got the blood pumping, and by the time Local Natives delivered an urgent cover of Television’s “Careful” (recorded last year for Aquarium Drunkard’s album covers project), they were undeniable. They sent the crowd to intermission with “Cubism Dream,” its vocal whitecaps riding a wave of strings.

The arrival of a 23-piece orchestra for the second set seemed to infuse both the band and the crowd with certain giddiness. And why not? It was only 28 months ago that Local Natives first debuted their music to blogs, and two years ago this month they were the residents at the Silverlake Lounge. By the end of 2009, they’d become one of the big success stories of SXSW and signed record deals in the U.K. and the U.S.

Handclaps greeted the arrival of “Stranger Things,” and both that track and “Camera Talk” took on a cinematic air, thanks to the orchestra. Those songs, along with “Shapeshifter” and the wistful “Airplanes,” revealed how seemingly modest songs – the album, after all, was recorded in a garage studio helmed by producer Raymond Richards – can be intimate and expansive at once.

“Who Knows Who Cares” and “Sun Hands,” brought the beats back to the fore, and the audience stood, bounced and roared accordingly. As for Local Natives, they seemed to still be pinching themselves.

“The last course I took as a student at UCLA was architecture, and we came here on a field trip,” Rice said while a technician worked on his amp during the second set. “To be here only two and a half years later … This is my ultimate dream.”