February 4, 2007
MUSIC NEWS
ARCADE FIRE FUN
Last Monday Joe and I recorded our 5th podcast for Coke Music. Having started out fairly lame these podcasts are now getting pretty decent in my opinion. See what you think. Please? Anyway we had a god time doing podcast no. 5 and when we got out I had a message from a friend saying he had a spare ticket for The Arcade Fire gig that night at St John’s church in Smith Square, Westminster so I said “I’m in!â€
I bought the Arcade Fire album last year along with everyone else who had been told they were the best thing ever and quite liked it without getting hooked. To be honest I lumped them in with The Polyphonic Spree, The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev; all great bands who mean everything to their hardcore fans but just a bit too much of a good thing for my taste. Too epic! Too emotional! Too intense! Too many people on stage! Anyway this was the first time I had seen them live and for the first half hour of the gig it was more or less what I expected. Big! Emotional! Devotional! But the sound was not great. It was too loud for a church and all the subtlety and complexity of the songs was just ricocheting off the stone and colliding in a big emotional noise mulch. ‘Why don’t they just turn it down or unplug?’ I kept thinking, which, being old, I do more and more at gigs these days. After all here is a band whose technical chops are clearly superior to your average 3 chord guitar merchants, they’ve got all kinds of different instruments on stage and a good singer so why adhere so slavishly to the old fashioned notion that all ‘pop’ music should be blasted out at top volume if it stands any chance of impressing an audience?
Despite all this I gravitated towards the front and by the final half hour the sound seemed to have improved and I was digging the whole spectacle in a major way. All the semi religious euphoria that they trade on hit the mark and by then end I was totally transported. Most of the stuff they were playing was from their new album and it sounded very good indeed. When it was all over and the band filed out past the crowd to the exit where I happened to be standing by then so I just followed them out and was very close when they suddenly set up on the steps of the church and started playing an unplugged version of Wake Up. What a moment! Apparently they do this kind of thing a lot but I hadn’t seen anything like it, ever. It was an amazing climax to what was already a thoroughly climactic evening and like many other people I couldn’t resist whipping out my camera and grabbing a little chunk of it to guild my own memory box. Jimmy Bignutz has uploaded it for you if you’re interested and you’ll see that even though the sound and picture quality aren’t up to that much, the loveliness of their performance is kind of there. I think everyone who was there that night will remember it for a long time.
While I’m rambling indulgently about music may I take a moment to draw your attention to The Shins? Their new album Wincing The Night Away is an embarrassment of unassuming riches and though the music is not really ironic or silly as such, they have winningly elected to publicise it with several group shots that are (intentionally, I think) fucking stupid and hilarious. Viz:
It’s like a Bob Fossil tribute band! Hooray! Apparently they’ve just recorded an appearance on Nigel Godrich’s From The Basement (his excellent on-line music show) so that’ll be well worth forking out for when it arrives later this month on I-tunes and the From The Basement site. Now, here’s the Arcade Fire busking!