Arcade Fire
Nothing sets off the contrarian impulse quite like a frantic buzz around a band that’s only just released its first proper record. The Arcade Fire put out Funeral (Merge) in September, and already the Montreal-based group has amassed an impressive collection of press-kit hyperbole: in the Globe and Mail Robert Everett-Green opined, “It takes a band like Arcade Fire to remind you that we are all custodians of our innocence and that we let it die at our peril.” The band’s word-of-mouth ground game is even more spectacular: the Empty Bottle show I saw last Friday, which sold out weeks ago, was their second in Chicago in two days–and the first, at the Logan Square Auditorium on Thanksgiving night, drew a crowd of more than 800 despite the holiday.
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The drawn-out intros, the soaring choruses, the mighty riffs and chipper chords falling in to underline the melodies, the sweeping accordion and violin figures pointing the way like God (or Adam) on the Sistine Chapel ceiling–I’ll concede that all of this might seem like a little much. Nobody trying so hard could possibly mean it, right? All I can say is that if the Arcade Fire was faking that urgency and emotion, they managed to hoodwink a few hundred people for the duration of the show. The Bottle crowd was completely won over. To pick just one example, they fell rapturously silent for the quiet, tranced-out intro to “Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)”–and I mean the whole crowd, not just the superfans up front. It’s been a while since I’ve seen so many people hanging on nearly every note, responding to each new sound physically; typically I run into that at metal shows, if at all. But the Arcade Fire wasn’t stirring people up with aggression or anger–the only violence done to anyone, as far as I could see, was that a few radiant fans inadvertently stepped on some toes while jumping joyously up and down. Even more remarkable was the absence of hipster diffidence, of cool cats and kitties, arms folded, holding up the walls. Everyone seemed to have given themselves over to sugary sonic joy, and the band fed off that surrender until the show felt like an Orange Sunshine orgy of pop love. Afterward I was glad to spot one of the bar circuit’s regular tamale guys making his rounds. As much as I’d enjoyed all that sweetness, I wanted something else on my palate.
