When the most engaging thing your lead singer has to say during a 120 minute plus set at a 17,000 seat arena on the first of a three night stand is “Tonight after the show we rented out the room out for an extra hour if you guys wanna stay around and dance with us”, something isn’t quite right. But that is our Win Butler for you, a towering ego leading the last great rock and roll band by disappearing into the heart of it. With a core of seven musicians, and as many again for the touring band, Arcade Fire are a sound collective with an iffy boss and it makes them a bit of a drag live.
At Barclay Center Friday night, that large sucking sound was the vacuum which should have been filling with intelligence, charm, leadership, as part MC and part fascist dictator, by Butler and it wasn’t. So why was the Barclay Center set so much better than the band at MSG in 2010?
1. AF 2010 was a rock band and AF 2014 is a dance band, a groove lives on its tail and doesn’t need a centrifugal force. Chic never had one.
2. Reflektor is not only a better album than The Suburbs, it is a better live album than The Suburbs.
Highlights from Reflektor, the title track, “Joan Of Arc” “Afterlife” and easily the best song of the evening, the epic “Here Comes The Night Time”, mixed with “Keep The Car Running” and a couple of others, and a hyperactive stage and a doppelganger band in paper machete big heads and… Buster Pointdexter. That was all good, better than the last time I saw em four years ago, but it wasn’t enough to make them a great live band.
The band played songs from all their albums, very light on The Neon Bible, and kept to a very strong groove, this was essentially dance as team effort. All of which made sense because if the Canadian AF are the biggest Yank band around, they are also the only Yank band, the only big band, who don’t sing love songs at all and if your interest, as AF’s appears to be, is politics as collective unconscious, a sort of “Let The Force Be with You” musical mind meld protest songs about international usury and Third World paranoia and neo-post-Freudian self-help, this was the sound to do it to. Reflektor may have stiffed (two mistakes, it was too long and they needed a song to sucker the punters in), but it did what the band wanted it to do: refocused and lightened them up. The entire doubles and mirrors high concept boils down to what you see is not what you get and on song after song, throughout their career, that reflected back on their audience for more than their emotional welfare.
Opening act The Unicorns were pretty good, the indie rockers who just reformed after a ten year hiatus and couldn’t get the party started at Felt Forum, have improved in the past three weeks and while it took them awhile, before the set was over people were dancing in the aisle. Dan Deacon is an excellent DJ and his set was fine House Music. A dance contest wasn’t a contest but it was dance.
But AF couldn’t quite cash in on the good vibrations, how can so many people fail to seize the moment and imprint themselves on our DNA? There were short sharp dance sounds and a sense of restraint that didn’t build into a singular vision, a singular event. Seldom did they manage to sustain it, they were like the 2014 Yankees, they couldn’t put three wins together in a row, at least until near the end. It was Régine Chassagne’s powerful ” Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” as a personal statement of faith and deliverance, very very late, that turned the evening around. It was followed by some of “Personality Crises” lip synced by the doppelgangers and then one Buster Pointdexter, who seemed to revel in the big stage moment, joining the band to lead them into a dance clapped clapped bane of his existence “Hot Hot Hot” and brought down the house. With all the momentum imaginable, Win jumped all over it with the most thrilling take on “Here Comes The Night Time”, an explosion of dance energy which took Barclay Center to unparalleled heights: much better than the recorded version -which suggest James Murphy may have not done the job he should have on the album, certainly none of his work with Arcade Fire is equal to his remix of David Bowie’s “Love Is Lost” (Bowie’s greatest moment in over 25 years). A song later Win was inviting us to hang around for Steve Mackey DJ set and performing “Wake Up” , a song they should relegate to a midset pick me up, “Night” is a better closer.
The story of Arcade Fire is that of a blank slate band who learnt how to write rock anthems yet never became Coldplay or U2, or even Bruce or the Stones, they never became sentimentalists. Arcade Fire had the aesthetic reach of the Sex Pistols (who also never wrote love songs) with the bombastic power of classic rock. And they then added EDM to the mix. But they are deeply arrogant rockists and it comes from the top down. It is Win Butler’s fault. Never before has one man looked more like what he is, in this case you can judge a book by its cover: for all his energy, for all the movement on stage, Win is unbearable at the center. He can’t talk to the audience, he can’t be bigger than what he is, he can’t make us believe he cares. How can you have a smug dance band? Arcade Fire is the smuggest band on earth and they are a dance band and it hurt them but it didn’t destroy them Friday night.
Grade: B
