NeighborPolled: Arcade Fire - FUNERAL poll

For me the grandiose ambition of their records was appealing and compelling when they were nobodies, but felt bombastic and entitled when they were huge.

extremely difficult to overstate just how good and overwhelming this album is

Haïti is my favourite song on this album, and The Suburbs is a better album imho

I still quite enjoy Funeral, as I learned this morning after my first play since, well, the Obama years. Neon Bible too. Dat's dat, though.

my first play since, well, the Obama years

That kind of defined the band for me in retrospect. Even though those first two albums pre-dated Obama's presidency, they were released after Obama was already catapulted into political stardom thanks to his convention speech, and in a way both of them kind of rose to greater prominence for embodying some kind of utopian optimism. I wasn't fully onboard with either, but I was rooting for them to grow beyond my expectations, and with Arcade Fire, they briefly won me over only to fade and eventually collapse altogether in shameful fashion.

Anyway, posting here because in recent weeks, people I know who are much more attached to Broadway musicals have been raving about Stereophonic. (I was completely unaware of its original off-Broadway run.) I just saw Paul Schrader and film critic David Edelstein rave about it as well. I looked it up and was surprised to see that Will Butler had composed the music. I really had the blinders on, but it looks like this has launched a whole new thing for him outside of Arcade Fire. It's strange how the two musicals that have made the most waves on my social media feed in the past two months have been associated with two artists that benefitted greatly from being Pitchfork darlings in the mid-'00s. (The other is the new musical based on Sufjan Stevens's Illinois, which is supposed to be great.)