2017 Arcade Fire LP

ah yes, France, an oasis of reason and kindness, where one-third of the populace did not vote for a far-right-wing demagogue

Maybe the lyrics were bad on purpose. Everything about that? And you fell for them! Sucker.

I call this the Frank Zappa defense. Oh, you thought the music was brilliant? Well it was a piss take, and you fell for it. Oh, you thought the music was terrible? Well, it was terrible on purpose, and you fell for it!

haha, that should be ever think, not everything. Stupid phone. Now I know exactly how Trump feels.

infinite content, we're infinitely covfefe

Oh Will, you asshole you're tarnishing whatever good songs the band previously had with that attitude. He's turning into indie BIlly Corgan.

shocking that a guy who hadn't lost a parent or lover or sibling but named his debut album funeral anyways would eventually be revealed as tone-deaf cluebag

The infuriating part is that he refuses to believe what people didn't like about the album was the music, but the campaign. A couple of years from now when the album is revised without the "fake news" context, will the reviews be kinder to the music and lyrics? I doubt it.

i am lolling at this guy and his Adbusters for Dummies.

its pretty easy to ignore though. he seems genuinely stunned that a record label would be successful at doing the thing that they do. he isn't saying anything new, criticizing internet hate is the easiest thing in the world to do.

Internet Outrage is the Background Radiation of the modern era. everyone exploits it constantly. there is nothing insightful about noting this, people note this constantly, all day long, every day. it just makes it more pathetic when you try and pretend that pointing this out is some brilliant thing people aren't picking up on.

maybe try no concept next time this over achieving pomo marketing is off putting.

Like I said, he could have said everything he needed to say on the tour. There was absolutely nothing about "Achtung Baby" the album that tied it to the themes of the Zoo TV tour. The difference, of course, is that "Achtung Baby" is awesome, and by all accounts this Arcade Fire album is not. Start with good music, music that means something to people, and you earn the right to be heard, let alone the right to preach.

he should put 'Band Is Really Amazing At Music' on a T shirt instead.

Like I said, he could have said everything he needed to say on the tour. There was absolutely nothing about "Achtung Baby" the album that tied it to the themes of the Zoo TV tour. The difference, of course, is that "Achtung Baby" is awesome, and by all accounts this Arcade Fire album is not. Start with good music, music that means something to people, and you earn the right to be heard, let alone the right to preach.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, September 22, 2017 4:29 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is interesting and otm. The huge difference - apart from AB being a great album - is that U2 did succeed in merging the earnest and the obscene/cynical, mostly through Bono's Mephisto personage. It was a very clever move to comment on consumerism by taking on a Faustian guise, and take nothing away from 'saviour Bono' (for better or for worse).

The other part of it is that when you make a record in this modern context, it instantly gets refracted in the media. There’s all this side content, this trail that follows everything. So we thought that maybe we’d just make all that content, as opposed to just making the art.

ban optics metaphors

Band Is Really Amazing at Music and Plays a Live Show and People Cry Because It’s So Beautiful

I’m increasingly starting to believe that every musician is a talented, empathetic, normal person, at first, but that the mechanisms and pressures of having to sustain a business based on your ability to document your experience in saleable and relevant ways turns people into antisocial bizarro versions of themselves

Just going to post what I posted earlier:

Yeah, I've been worrying how this band will take a backlash... They've had one coming for a while now, and even if I like Everything Now more and more, it's a weird album and they fucked up the rollout severely. I'm not sure I see them course correcting gracefully.

― Frederik B, 8. august 2017 23:48 (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The final song on the album ends If you can't see / the forrest for the trees / just burn it all down / and bring the ashes to me Which is lovely. So why the fuck did they decide to sell that sentiment by planting more trees?

I have worked with and been personal friends with a number of clients through their ascendency, their halcyon days, a period of backlash, and then the doldrums that follow, and I think that it's a far more terrifying complicated and beautiful thing than anybody could ever imagine

I think about it with all my present clients who are currently golden-children-who-can-do-no-wrong, seeing their management teams throw absolutely everything their way, seeing, literally, reality bend to meet their needs, as private jets are hired to accommodate a night out, or orchestras summoned to magically appear onstage to Elicit Even More Pathos, and seeing tens-of-thousands-of-dollars well-spent to make everything work and feel exciting and hold the audience's attention

And then there's this moment where the person and their music loses all its potential energy, and now it feels like an inert presence, and their words and the sentiment of their music no longer feel valuable but actually unwanted, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as their songwriting voices become solipsistic, and we're left with whatever-the-fuck-it-is that this music is trying to do

Now, see - and you would absolutely know better than I - but Arcade Fire never seemed like superstar personalities. That is, people like the music and they are great performers, and that is why they're popular, not because Win is some pin-up or Regine gets on TMZ or something. They seem (and again, could be wrong) like they could easily go out anywhere and not be recognized/bothered, or chased down the street or whatever. A lot of pop stars definitely go down the rabbit hole of fame you observe, but I think that's often because they can't go out, or are so famous they need to be isolated or isolate themselves. People like Bono, or Bowie, or maybe even, say, someone like St. Vincent, recognizable icons; I suspect they exist/existed in a parallel universe of private back rooms, surrounded by other famous faces. They have to be careful with their statements, because people parse and misquote. They have to be careful who they hang out with, because people are always taking their picture. But Arcade Fire? They just seem like the wrong vectors/vessels for jaded cynicism. I don't know if someone's been whispering in their ear, or if they really feel like they have something to say but don't know how to say it, but it just feels wrong from them. Like someone yelling "pay attention to me!" and then saying something silly, and then complaining that everyone is listening and hearing the wrong things. Almost as if they wanted to be jaded rock stars as a pretense to thematically protesting the role.

I do agree with Win that the album is not 'jaded cynicism' at all. It's very very earnest. But the cynicism of the campaign, of parts of their performance at Roskilde, and of this interview, perhaps hits even harder because everything else is so earnest. Like, where the fuck is this coming from? What happened? But yeah, I guess you get lost in the hall of mirrors from time to time.

Josh, that's a thread of analysis that I don't really participate in, I haven't met or worked with a single person occupying a "superstar" role who seemed naturally born into it, or who fitted comfortably into it-- even Bowie was saying dumb solipsistic shit through the 80s and 90s

With regards to this band in particular, I felt and feel as if there are two disparate and incongruous approaches to the songwriting approach. The first is a voice of inclusivity, where the often-used word "kids" is meant to denote the singer and band and audience and world at large. The second is a voice of exclusivity, where "kids" becomes a strawman group, that seems to indict all listeners, and positions the singer somehow morally above the object of their ire.

One astute reviewer referred to this second voice as one that employs "the Dylan-esque 'you'", which I really thought was spot-on.

The second voice started to kind of appear on Neon Bible, but only fully took form for the first time on "Rococo", where the lyric "let's go downtown and watch the modern kids / they will eat right out of your hand / using great big words that they don't understand" subverted the previous usages of the word "kids" ("nothing's hid! from us kids! with the lights out!"; "us kids know / no cars go"; "all the kids have always known / that the emperor wears no clothes").

The effect is like when your wife or husband spitefully uses a term of endearment in a fight, a sneering "have it your way, SWEETIE," and effectively ruins all past and future usages of that term of endearment

That's my biggest concern, really, just a songwriter's voice that once spoke for the audience, and now seemed to turn around to indict the audience. If you're singing vaguely about a group of people you don't like, it's possible the audience will feel personally attacked-- "is he calling ~me~ a hipster?"

Anyway

The lyrics on this album don't work for me, and it's frustrating to revisit an album like Funeral where a title of a song is maybe sung once or not at all in the lyrics, to an album like this one where the title of a song is repeated more often than is beautiful

You are so massively otm about 'kids' :(

It's funny to me that more people are waking up to the fact that Arcade Fire is terrible. Funeral had a bunch of good tracks, and everything since then has been largely awful, with a few small exceptions.

I disagree with that assessment, but agree with much of fgti's aforementioned. I think the band's problem (if it's a problem) is that they are really good with general feelings, but less strong with statements. Unlike, say, Springsteen, they're just not as suited to big picture commentary as they are to catharsis; I can't defend the last couple of Coldplay records, for example, but I do think they made a concerted effort to dumb things down to better match the simple, broad emotions their music is designed to project. AF, it's like they're trying to will themselves into being something they're not, but unfortunately it doesn't work that way, even when you are very smart (like Bowie or, by all accounts, Bono).

Hard disagree with "this band has always been terrible", tho I see and hear that assessment often. What I think people mean is "this band has always been corny" which is like yes obviously, there was never a moment when this band was not corny, but when they pull it off it really works

"This band has always been terrible" is lazy challops. 'Funeral' is a near perfect album, whether you have any need for it or not: it's devastatingly honest about its intention: using Grand Gestures to convey Big Emotions in a maximal way. It worked because it was completely, almost embarrassingly honest.

AF going the cynical, 'see what we did here, wink wink' meta route just falls completely flat. It alienates the people who got on board early because of the honesty and lack of cynicism, and I can't really see a lot of new listeners getting excited about it. It's certainly not something you can't find anywhere else.

Counterpoint: The band is still playing the United Center here in a month. Counter-counterpoint: not sold out yet, don't think.

absolutely superb observation re "kids", fgti. ties in v much with the changing sense of "we" that i had felt in the band's recent music but been unable to articulate/observe in so exact a way.

Listening to this for the first time, since I'm seeing them next week, and ... no, it's not very good. A bunch of half-assed musical and lyrical ideas. I can imagine a few of the tracks doing well live, though.

this band has gotten worse with every album since the (really good) debut. a stunning achievement! i look forward to seeing what horrible depths they reach by album #10

neon bible is better. funeral rules but so much of it has been stripped and exhausted of meaning by ubiquitous licensing & influence (epiphany-core style "WHOAAA-OHHH-OHHH-AH-OHHHH" songs)

I like The Suburbs a lot. I'd say this one marks their entry into the two stiffs in a row club.

The Suburbs is still their worst album by a mile.

wow. why do you say that? At the very least even if you don't like it it's got two or three or four or five songs even that are clearly better than anything on the new one or the last one.

Suburbs is def the one I prefer these days

It's overlong - yeah, Reflektor is longer, but it's split in two - it's samey, and I dislike the hits. I like We Used to Wait, and that's pretty much it. Also, a concept album about suburbs is the most boring thing Arcade Fire could have ever done.

the firs three albums are all good to a degree, just each one is less good than the one before it.

yea suburbs has tracks but it was definitely the beginning of "oh, this is a completely exhausted and tin-eared concept they're going for, great." I mean with funeral, it looks worse in retrospect because of how much it was copied, but it was original for its time. and the anti-organized religion angle of neon bible was relevant or at the very least not embarrassing in the second to last year of the Bush administration.

This band is actively ruined by their frontsman’s ego. Funeral is the best for me because he had no clue how huge it would be. Every effort since then shows promise but it’s ruined by this certain douchiness in every delivery of its lyrics. Too judgmental of its own fanbase in such a shallow ways.

Funeral - a solid, decent rock album that sounded really fresh at the time and still gets play at Latin Heights on occasion
Neon Bible - just couldn't get my head around how horrible the production was on this one. Seemed to lay the foundation for dozens of bad indie acts with no control over the high-end and reverb knobs on their mixing desks
Suburbs - never made it all the way through, but it gets points for 'The Sprawl II: Mountains Beyond Mountains' which is maybe their first or joint-best song after 'Rebellion (Lies)'. I liked the weird signature on 'Modern Man'. The rest I don't remember.
Reflektor - Like a bad copy of a bad copy of Talking Heads with every ounce of groove drained from it. Terrible lyrics. Terrible terrible.
Everything Now - See Reflektor but even worse, plus added disco parodies and weak 'stick it to THE MAN' lyrics

Neon Bible - just couldn't get my head around how horrible the production was on this one
a sad thing since the songwriting was good

what's Latin Heights?

where i live

the other thing I couldn't get my head around was re-releasing a b-side from their first album on their second one.

Not least because "No Cars Go" sounds like a b-side.

No Cars Go was not a B side, it was on their first EP and by far the best thing on there

still

Can I be mad that this record sucks AND effectively erased my old band (yes....Everything, Now!) from the Internet. Just tryna sell Basecamp mp3s and leftover vinyl, Win, sheesh.

...rude.

a not quite small enough number of extremely unimaginative ilxors will still get this into the eoy 77, you just watch

still really can't get past his singing voice. i like bad voices sometimes but his isn't interesting.

I really want to get this into 77, both because I still like it a fair amount, and because it would piss people off, but I'm fairly certain it won't work.

I think this album is a good candidate for a fake top 10 placement