2017 Arcade Fire LP

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

@ dog latin - there are plenty of bands that re-recorded strong songs from earlier/poorly recorded albums and EP's for later records. "Welcome to Paradise," pretty much everything on the pre-TOTBL Interpol EP's, Ariel Pink's 'studio' records...

no way in hell is this going 77

'No Cars Go' is the very best this band could ever do.

Yeah it's one of their marquee songs. Not sure but I'd bet it's been on their the setlist every night for over a decade, along with Rebellion (Lies) and Wake Up.

So weird. Even when the band was touring Funeral people would go crazy for No Cars Go, but I think it's a big nothing.

The Suburbs we always be the most underrated thing they ever did!

we = will

One I feel most compelled to return to. It’s great.

this band has gotten worse with every album since the (really good) debut. a stunning achievement!

Hahaha yes I can agree to that

I still believe that the promise indie showed in the early to mid 00’s pointed out to something fucking amazing, but it got lost.

and Funeral was one of the best examples

Oh well

I still believe that the promise indie showed in the early to mid 00’s pointed out to something fucking amazing, but it got lost.

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Saturday, October 28, 2017 7:53 AM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This. I'm on a real 2005 nostalgia tip right now and it feels like (especially in the US) there was this point around 2004 where 'indie' music was having this incredible renaissance where rock and noise and folk music were converging and doing some really inspiring stuff. Flash forward to about 2009 and it had homogenised and dissipated into this terrible self-congratulatory woodcutting shit.

not all indie

what actually happened was that there was a tremendous explosion in the number of bands,meaning you had to search harder to hear the good stuff as the lowest common denominator shit floated to the top

saying that indie itself stagnated is dumb. and the arcade fire were always crap

(that's harsh obv but imo if you ever saw them as the flagbearers of indie then you were taking your eye very far off the ball)

no sure that's fine, of course there was good stuff if you looked, like in every genre at every time. But like, 2004-2005 you had (off the top of my head) Arcade Fire (Funeral), Animal Collective (Sung Tongs), Fiery Furnaces (Blueberry Boat), Wolf Parade (Apologies to the Queen Mary), Devendra Banhardt (Rejoicing In The Hands) all kind of bursting into the alt limelight at roughly the same time and making music that sounded relatively credible and original-sounding; compare a few years later and most of these bands had stagnated into self-parody and begat a commodified scene that encompassed stuff like Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. The noise scene that felt very vital and challenging (Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Wolf Eyes etc) hit a dead-end in many respects too. That whole Amerindie loft-scene thing burnt brightly for just a few years and it's easy to dismiss that in retrospect.

It'd be interesting to compare the numbers of bands coming through at those times - I think it's hard to get a handle this on given the shifts in what constituted indie music in that timeframe so I'm wary of making claims about the genre as a whole but there did seem to be a move towards blandness on the folk side of things (would definitely consider Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver key artists in that respect).

^ that all feels very real to me, but maybe because I was in college and Pitchfork was at its peak taste-making powers and it’s hard to see objectively around those two major forces

*xp to DL

Saw the band Monday night and they were great, as usual. The high-concept BS of the marketing campaign was largely abandoned (short some occasional fake ads or goofy pre-recorded used car salesmen schtick to buy merch), and the in-the-round setup worked pretty well. The band's theatricality remains really effective, and their passion (affected or not) is pretty infectious. Still don't like the new songs, but they definitely sound better when there are less of them to listen to. I do wish the band were smarter, which would make its attempts to act smart more effective (a la Peter Gabriel or someone equally presentation-aware), but they sure know how to put on a cathartic show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvqNWYggnVA

this is really not good lol

hoo boy

....

good god this is lame