2017 Arcade Fire LP

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

"inspired by the current climate of the country, with a hopeful message to the youths"

poor youths. this is teh cringe.

embed still is sufficient lol

have never seen a band with a more mid life crisis vibe

should have retired after The Suburbs

this isnt that bad, it sounds like slower andrew wk

also reminds me of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GhPUAVgHZc

this isnt that bad

I mean yeah on the surface it's a decent song musically speaking, but devvvine really nails it with the "midlife crisis rock" label. Win Butler has sounded desperately try hard since Reflektor, and Everything Now was straight cringe and utterly, lyrically tone deaf. I'll admit this is a marginal improvement though but I wish they'd focus inward again.

priors: i dont have any strong emotional attachment to their earlier work, so i have no expectations

i'm just not really sure who this is speaking from the perspective of or who it's speaking to

i know they said it's a message for the youths but it is not speaking their language and it is not clear what the message is

nope, nevermind, I get what you meant about midlife crisis rock, that's it otm