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tHE FLAMING LIPS
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with special guests Stardeath and White Dwarfs
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ARCADE FIRE'S EVANGELICAL EXPANSION
It's hard to avoid the obvious subject when
discussing Neon Bible, the second album from
Montreal's Arcade Fire. For one thing, it's called
I Neon Bible; for another, it was recorded in a
church, and the band spent a five-day resi
dency at New York's Judson Memorial Church in
February, playing to (and even among) ecstatic
crowds. So the obvious spin keeps cropping up in
articles and reviews, such as this one from, well.
Spin: "If Arcade Fire can add another chapter as
i inspirational as this, they'll need to add a lot
; more pews." The thing is, this is one of those
i cases where something is obvious because it's
true.
I caught Arcade Fire at an L.A. gig two years
: ago, during the tour for the band's debut Funeral.
\ and it remains one of the best shows I've ever
| seen. In my experience, the event it most resem-
I bled was a service at a Pentecostal church: the
same fervor in the performers, spreading through
the congregation like a wave; the same yelps
and singalongs prompted by what must be the
1 Spirit; even a guy excoriating the audience for
not being devout enough (i.e., a Superfan yelling
all night about how we weren't dancing enough,
, and how the crowd at an earlier show were "real
fans"). If there had been any serpents present, I
have no doubt they would have been taken up.
But every religion faces the same prob
lem: the things done in its name. Just as one
shouldn't blame Jesus for, say, Rick Santorum or
Jerry Falwell, one shouldn't blame Arcade Fire for
its more vocal proselytizers. When evangelism
turns hateful (Federal Marriage Amendment) or
merely annoying ("You're not real fans!"), it's
easy to write off the whole faith along with the
faithful. Take, for example, this excerpt from a
February 2005 blog post by Flagpole's own Mike
Barthel in which he referenced a conversation
between two characters on "Gilmore Girls:"
"Cringy though it was, this exchange A a pret
ty good illustration of why the band in question
rubs me the wrong way right now:
Rory: Do you like the Arcade Fire?
Lo r elai: I don't know, do I?
Rory: Yes. you do.
Hey! Maybe, no, she doesn't!"
I don't mean to single out Barthel, one of the
best music critics around, for a two-year-old blog
post, but that comment stuck with me for two
years because it does seem pretty representa
tive of a general negative reaction to Arcade Fire
that's based more on the evangelical fire of the
group's fans than on the music itself. Granted,
it's always a little cringy when Rory or Lane start
rattling off indie band names (cf. Lane's Art Brut
soliloquy on the show a month or two back), but
if the show's producers or writers or whomever
want people to know they like Arcade Fire, what
does that have to do with the band itself, or its
music?
CULT OF MUSICALITY
Well, for one thing, nobody likes being told
what to like (at least not so explicitly). And
Arcade Fire is almost never introduced as "hey,
here's some band you might enjoy;" it's always
the real-world equivalent of Natalie Portman
handing you a set of headphones to try and
change your life, except instead of Natalie
Portman, it's some punctuation-challenged blog
ger or pasty music critic or Chris Martin (Arcade
Fire is "the greatest band in history," says Mr.
Paltrow).
The modern smart person's reaction to such
apparent hyperbole is "nuh-uh." When I finally
saw Little Miss Sunshine after months of breath
less hype, only to discover it was a middling
quirky-family indie dramedy, my reaction was
vitriolic scorn, aimed more at the movie's pro
ponents than the movie itself. A quick glance
around the blogosphere reveals quite a few peo
ple having the same reaction to Arcade Fire—al
most as many as are shouting its name from the
rooftops. There's not much of a middle ground.
And it's not like the group is all that difficult
to hate. For one thing, if the band were any
more Canadian, it would-be a "Kids in the Hall"
sketch (we get it, you speak French and spell
"favorite" with a U). Second of all, there's band
cofounder/ co-leader Regine Chassagne, the Tike
to frontman/ husband Wir, Butler's Spike, who
onstage comes across as super-precious, the kind
of person who's always aware of the camera,
even when there s not one on her. (A recent New
York Times Magazine profile confirms her Drama
Club President status: "Meanwhile, Regine... will
riff excitedly on an idea for a guitar solo (Let it
hang between the breaths of the melody... like
an—I don't know—like an airplane... make it
really fourth dimension!) and then, frustrated
by her failures of metaphor, will rise onto her
stockinged toes to dance the line of a lazy guitar
lick that lingers behind a song's principal melody
and—body suspended, then tripping forward-
catches it just at the end.")
Then there's the fact that Arcade Fire is the
kind of band that gets anointed by elder states
men like Davids Bowie and Byrne, the kind of
band that gets profiled in the The New Yorker
and the New York Times Magazine in the first
place: it is the Official Band of NPR, the indie-
rock weirdoes safe enough for your parents, the
White Knights With Guitars, the Makers of Real
Music riding in to save us from the Timbalands
and Neptunes who have turned the music world
into a sterile computer-generated bleep-and-
bloop-ridden wasteland (as if it were an either/
or proposition). Arcade Fire is the dream band of
someone who thinks Rock Still Needs Saving, and
if you think that premise is ridiculous, you might
find the band a little ridiculous as well.
SCALES OF SOUND
But listening to Neon Bible is almost enough
to convince you that Rock does Need Saving, and
Arcade Fire is the band to do it. Unlike Funeral,
which sounded huge but dealt mainly with
personal history and personal grief. Neon Bible
is Bono-sized, tackling the Big Themes—War,
Death, Life, Love, God, America—and tackling
them head-on. The sound is accordingly larger
as well; Funeral was the sound of people making
more noise than the space around them could
contain, which gave it a ramshackle power that
Neon Bible lacks. Now the members of Arcade
Fire has given themselves a bigger space, and
the sound has expanded to fill—though not ex
ceed—that vastness.
The new scale of sound does result in mo
ments that couldn't have happened on Funeral.
Album opener "Black Mirror" is coal-mine music,
an echoing, crescendoing swirl of noise that
seems to emanate from stone, from caves and
corridors, always around the corner, until the
sawing strings come in at the 2/3 mark, and, all
of a sudden, the song's right in front of you.
Even more epic is "Intervention," which, like
most of the album, took me a while to appreci
ate. I first heard it two years ago in a subdued
acoustic live version, and then again earlier this
year in a tinny, trebly BBC radio rip of the album
version. I dismissed it as pretty but inconse
quential—that is, until I heard it rumbling from
surround-sound car speakers, this great overtak
ing wave of pipe organ demolishing everything in
its path. (This is definitely an album to listen to
at maximum volume.)
That's one of the trade-offs of the Internet .
era of music: the same medium that can make a
band a success can also make it instantly over
exposed, engendering a backlash before the lash
has run its course. The urge to hear more and
more can be immediately satisfied, but this rav-
30 FLAGPOLE.COM • MARCH 28, 2007 • NEWS & FEATURES I ARTS & EVENTS I MOVIES I MUSIC I COMICS & ADVICt I CLASSIFIEDS