Arcade's Life after Death

The first time I heard Arcade Fire I was driving home from work and I happened to tune into a radio show that I listen to once a month in the Hartford area. The show is widely known to me as the show that plays a lot of unusual music and they throw in people like Faust, Can, and odd others. This is the same program that got me into Can as a teenager and somehow it still surfaces once in a great while with the same DJ who according to my friend, this DJ has was still spinning music when my friend was a teenager. He played an Arcade Fire song that had such an impression on me that I wanted to hear it again and again. The DJ pointed out that the CD will be out in the next month or so. I really could not wait. The song was called "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)." I liked it because of it's originality and the vocal and lyrics were quite strong.

Watching them on SNL Saturday confirmed that they are a great band with a lot of growth already in their blood. The song I liked was not played on the show, but their music had a feel like no other. According to all music "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" the first of four metaphorical forays into the geography of the soul, follows a pair of young lovers who meet in the middle of the town through tunnels that connect to their bedrooms. Over a soaring piano lead that's effectively doubled by distorted guitar, they reach a Lord of the Flies-tinged utopia where they can't even remember their names or the faces of their weeping parents. It had a power like no other song that I was listening to at that time. It made a tattoo like impression that to this day still makes me cringe.



What I liked about the song and then eventually the album was the fact that each member of the band does not stick to one idea. They don't even stick with the same instrument. Sometimes the guitar player plays percussion. Even Win's wife Regine plays keyboards, violin and accordion. Very good for a band to make a impression on me. Arcade Fire's victorious soul-thumping core, is a goose bump-inducing rallying cry centered around the notion that "the power's out in the heart of man, take it from your heart and put it in your hand."(AM) They kick ass and take no names.

The original sound of Arcade Fire is what makes the band. I like the music because even though the band is small by it's standards, but the music is huge. Each song is like a mini Symphony. The words are even better. Win may get political, but that is his charm. He tells the truth and not many people do that and still get you to listen. The anticipation of hearing each song is fun with me because each is not the same as the previous. Even after the album came out I really wanted to get the next CD they put out. They have put out three and two others after their debut and each is great and wonderful as but hearing the music for the first time is quite good.


Funeral is a great album from start to finish. Arcade Fire are not bereft of whimsy. Each one of their songs that pump blood back into the heart as fast and furiously as it's draining from the sleeve on which it beats, each little piece of music is a wonderful novella and I really wish bands could write like this. If you need something beyond the typical Rock and Roll this is the album. Arcade Fire came at us like and knocked us down. The music in new and original and so fun that you really have to re listen. Have a great time with this and the last paragraph explains their music better then I can. It's from the great Pitchfork review of the album where it got a 9.7 out of 10.0. Enjoy!!!

So long as we're unable or unwilling to fully recognize the healing aspect of embracing honest emotion in popular music, we will always approach the sincerity of an album like Funeral from a clinical distance. Still, that it's so easy to embrace this album's operatic proclamation of love and redemption speaks to the scope of The Arcade Fire's vision. It's taken perhaps too long for us to reach this point where an album is at last capable of completely and successfully restoring the tainted phrase "emotional" to its true origin. Dissecting how we got here now seems unimportant. It's simply comforting to know that we finally have arrived.