Arcade Fire did a wave of surprise or unexpected concerts recently. The first one on June 4th was a very private and intimate show at the Notman House in Montréal in front of a very small crowd. Someone who was here commented that ‘if once they evoked Bruce Springsteen, U2 or the Talking Heads, on Friday I heard the Clash, New Order, Clues and Big Star.’ I don’t know about that, I was not there.
They also played two consecutive nights at the Théâtre Granada in Sherbrooke, Québec on June 7th and 8th, a show on a parking lot outside a shopping mall in Longueuil, Quebecon on June 9th, and yesterday the first of their two shows at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto, Canada.
Beside the already released ‘Month of May’ and ‘The Suburbs’, they tried out some of their new material from their soon-to-be-released third album which should be out early August. Some crappy videos have been posted on youtube and Vimeo, some of them being much better than others, and they give an idea of what we can expect from the next album:
‘Suburban War’, which begins slowly, is a song where the music is desperately quiet and the vocals distinctive. The lyrics evoke the opposition between the city and the suburbs, a theme that seems to be central in the album:
‘This town’s so strange/They built it to change/And while we sleep/We know this dream’s been rearranged/But my old friends/I can remember when/Before your war against the suburbs began…before it began./Now the music divides ascended tribes.’
This battle theme was already present in ‘The Suburbs’ with lyrics like ‘In a suburban war/Your part of town against mine’, so I can’t wait for the album to be released to see how these songs fit together.
‘Ready to Start’ seems to be in the continuity of some of their previous work, same beat than ‘Keep the car running’, a quite noisy hard-rocking and electric song, built around a clapping drum, a little repetitive and with no change during the song. ‘More Neon Bible’ than ‘Funeral’, with lyrics about fear ‘If I was scared, I would/And if I was pure, I was’, reminding the ‘I can taste the fear’ of ‘Intervention’.
‘Empty Room’ has Régine as the singing lead and is once again a fast and rocking song, a little bit like a faster ‘Rebellion’.
‘Rococo’ has a funny and interesting chorus ‘Rococo rocococo’ that Win repeats with a lot of determination many times, whereas the other members harmonize behind. The song builds up in the sound at the end with even more harmonizing voices and dramatic aggressiveness in the vocals, just like a classic Arcade fire song, a song you would like to hear just before some big end-of-the-world thing; well, not really, it’s not at the level of ‘Wake up’ but it has its moment. With some vindictive lyrics like ‘Let’s go downtown and watch the modern kids/They will eat right out of your hand/using great big words that they don’t understand’, Rococo seems to be one of their angry songs, but why ‘Rococo? Is it because their music has been qualified as baroque?
‘City with no children’ is very keyboard-oriented (at least to the recording I have heard) and also the most Springsteenesque song.
‘Modern Man’ is a slightly bouncing New Wave tune, which starts a little bit like ‘The Well And The Lighthouse’ but stays almost at the same sonic level all the time. It is catchy and uses again the adjective modern,… modern man, modern kids.
‘We Used To Wait’, with its bumpy, almost keyboard smashing tempo, is another new track that can remind a Springsteen song especially during the chorus ‘Wooo we used to wait/we used to wait’; however it still sounds like a true Arcade Fire song.
Overall, I’m not blown away by the songs, but these are crappy recordings, it’s a little bit frustrating and I just want to listen to the album! But I can guess that these songs will be fun live.
Arcade Fire has always managed to trigger true emotions from a powerfully glorious sound and grandiose lyrical themes like death, pain, fear, faith, and redemption. I certainly hope they will be able to deliver another large sounding album with more of these passionately intense vocals, another collection of these layers of sounds ready to burst in these bombastically moving moments at any time.
On a side note, Nicole Simone has announced a free show backed by horn player Kelly Pratt from Arcade Fire at The Living Room on Monday June 14th in NYC.