Features | Concerts
The Arcade Fire
By Alan Baban | 15 February 2007
This set of five "low-key" London gigs all sold out in two minutes, seven if you factor in all the e- assholes puckering up five minutes before the allotted 9 a.m. get-go. The event was marketed front-to-back as the kind of seminal "were you there' soiree that make scenesters and culture snobs salivate over, not realising, perhaps, that by the virtue of their very involvement, the exclusivity of the experience is somewhat dissipated.
On the other hand, I guess a lot of people just really want to see the Arcade Fire live: old, young, with toupees and with hats. Chris Martin's here. Somebody told me he attempted to high-five every member of the band as they did the Kodak-apocalyptic crowd walk-through, though I have no idea whether this is true (or, more interestingly, if Win and co. went for it). One thing, though, is certain: the Arcade Fire have what one might call "universal appeal." Kanye is coming.
From the moment the group takes the stage, we are living the cliché of callisthenics and performance art: Regine purrs and pouts, striking scowls and poses, really, from where I'm standing, accentuating those silly and somewhat superfluous keyboard jabs in the chorus of the closer, "(Antichrist Television Blues)." I've never seen the band so into the depths and confines of their music; perhaps this can be attributed to their playing, for the most part, big chunks out of the forthcoming commercial clutter of the nascent Neon Bible. Whatever the cause, this is possibly the only concert I've been to where the audience had to actively instigate crowd participation and band response: in the fourth song, somebody chucked Richard Reed Perry a clumsily-scrawled note -- "The left speaker is fucked." And while the Porchester Hall's elegance and sense of intimate grandeur plays right into the group's musical pyramid scheme, as a venue for a concert, it leaves a little to be desired. The sound is intermittently muffled and bled dry with, yes, one annoying speaker operating at odds with everything else, which is annoying if you consider that one of the big draws of the Arcade Fire's sound is, for all its hurdy-gurdy, marimbas and esoteric paraphernalia, stark and simple arrangements. The instruments don't collide, they pull together and rush.
Despite this, the sheer brute graft of the band's dalliance with hyperkinetics and stroke couture carries over brilliantly: the exploding kick-drum between verses of "The Lighthouse and the Well" and the rhythmic jabberwocking of "Bad Vibrations" resonates, whereas orchestral expansion of "No Cars Go" makes real that epic importance the original only suggested. The Funeral (2004) tracks, predictably, go down a storm, particularly the inspired segue between "Power Out" and "Rebellion," during which Win jumped guitar-clad into the crowd and started running around in an open gesture of band/audience homogeneity. If we were living the cliché, we were living it well.
At the end, a kid in the front, sensing the after-show acoustic session all the blogs had clued us in on, swiped the wrong coat and rushed to the exit. He was the same kid who started lewdly winking at Regine during one song, and devotee or non-devotee, commissural or committal, he freaked me out. In any case, it didn't really matter who got to the main entrance of the hall first -- the band, having started "Wake Up" there, proceeded up stairs and through vast multitudes of camera-flashes and pandering hands.
At the end I hit up falafel central with a friend who had e-bayed 100 pounds for a single ticket. I didn't really know what to say, so I started talking about how tasty the falafel was. The falafel, by the way, was amazing.
On the other hand, I guess a lot of people just really want to see the Arcade Fire live: old, young, with toupees and with hats. Chris Martin's here. Somebody told me he attempted to high-five every member of the band as they did the Kodak-apocalyptic crowd walk-through, though I have no idea whether this is true (or, more interestingly, if Win and co. went for it). One thing, though, is certain: the Arcade Fire have what one might call "universal appeal." Kanye is coming.
From the moment the group takes the stage, we are living the cliché of callisthenics and performance art: Regine purrs and pouts, striking scowls and poses, really, from where I'm standing, accentuating those silly and somewhat superfluous keyboard jabs in the chorus of the closer, "(Antichrist Television Blues)." I've never seen the band so into the depths and confines of their music; perhaps this can be attributed to their playing, for the most part, big chunks out of the forthcoming commercial clutter of the nascent Neon Bible. Whatever the cause, this is possibly the only concert I've been to where the audience had to actively instigate crowd participation and band response: in the fourth song, somebody chucked Richard Reed Perry a clumsily-scrawled note -- "The left speaker is fucked." And while the Porchester Hall's elegance and sense of intimate grandeur plays right into the group's musical pyramid scheme, as a venue for a concert, it leaves a little to be desired. The sound is intermittently muffled and bled dry with, yes, one annoying speaker operating at odds with everything else, which is annoying if you consider that one of the big draws of the Arcade Fire's sound is, for all its hurdy-gurdy, marimbas and esoteric paraphernalia, stark and simple arrangements. The instruments don't collide, they pull together and rush.
Despite this, the sheer brute graft of the band's dalliance with hyperkinetics and stroke couture carries over brilliantly: the exploding kick-drum between verses of "The Lighthouse and the Well" and the rhythmic jabberwocking of "Bad Vibrations" resonates, whereas orchestral expansion of "No Cars Go" makes real that epic importance the original only suggested. The Funeral (2004) tracks, predictably, go down a storm, particularly the inspired segue between "Power Out" and "Rebellion," during which Win jumped guitar-clad into the crowd and started running around in an open gesture of band/audience homogeneity. If we were living the cliché, we were living it well.
At the end, a kid in the front, sensing the after-show acoustic session all the blogs had clued us in on, swiped the wrong coat and rushed to the exit. He was the same kid who started lewdly winking at Regine during one song, and devotee or non-devotee, commissural or committal, he freaked me out. In any case, it didn't really matter who got to the main entrance of the hall first -- the band, having started "Wake Up" there, proceeded up stairs and through vast multitudes of camera-flashes and pandering hands.
At the end I hit up falafel central with a friend who had e-bayed 100 pounds for a single ticket. I didn't really know what to say, so I started talking about how tasty the falafel was. The falafel, by the way, was amazing.