The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
You may just have heard of these chaps – apparently there’s a new album out.
Honestly, I don’t care that there are a million reviews out there, this is my blog and these are my thoughts. Writing it down often helps me to distil just what I think of a group sometimes. Although with Funeral I wrote something along the lines of ‘Shame the rest of the album doesn’t really live up to Laika’ and it took me until fully the end of the year to realise how brilliant the album really was.
This has sort of happened again, although this time I’ve been a bit more willing – as immune as I like to pretend myself to be, all the hype either makes me really want to love or, more often, really want to hate something. In this case I really wanted to love this album, but I was a little underwhelmed at first. Like Clap Your Hands, they have released a more downbeat, slightly more uneasy and less driving second album, but I think this is the better record.
The Arcade Fire seem to operate in this distorted orchestral runaway kind of area, with a grand, sweeping sound caught up in some kind of fuzzy distortion that is at once thrilling and emotive, but slightly disturbing as well. On Neon Bible sometimes the disturbing overwhelms the driving, as it were, but instead of being throttled by the tension as Clap Your Hands were, they don’t really seem to lose the dynamism of the song.
So, I’m still getting into this one, but it is growing on my all the time and I reckon by the end of the year it’ll be right up there. Is this the first really good major album of 2007? Well I think so, actually. And Intervention is one of those classic late night drunken turn it up fucking loud songs, which every now and then a band writes, and it always makes me love them for it in a special little place, right down in the depths of my black little soul.
Oh and, er, forget all the Springsteen comparisons. They’re bollocks. I mean, there are the odd moments where they do something a bit Springsteeny, but this is a mile away from The Boss
The Arcade Fire – Intervention
The Arcade Fire – No Cars Go
Hello Dear,
I’m sure I saw some tumbleweed roll past here a second a go…
I know, it’s embarrassing isn’t it. I felt a little dirty posting this one seeing as it’s been so thoroughly done to death already. Still, I am a bit of a completist as far as music is concerned, so I thought I might as well fire it up here. It thoroughly deserved the no comments at all status it had maintained until you justified its presence by opening your big m… oops, maybe not.
I’m not into this release at all. I think I’m just tired of all the epic crescendo-happy stuff out right now. In fact, I may be tired of Arcade Fire because of all the bands that want to be Arcade Fire.