Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire
The Arcade Fire is a band that owes a lot to its "indie" forerunners of the late '90s and early '00s, the type of consistently great artists like Spoon, Ted Leo, Broken Social Scene, etc. that you hadn't heard of unless you attended private school. But you did hear about the Canadian multi-instrumentalists, a big group (seven members) from a small label (Merge) that always spoke with ironclad conviction, even if what they were saying was fairly obvious. Their bitterly nostalgic breakthrough is one of the most deserving right-place, right-time scenarios in rock history.

Of course, opportunity means little if you ain't got talent, and Funeral finds Arcade Fire seemingly exhausting all of its jollies in a single brilliant record. Lots of bands overthink their tracklists, so it's nice to find one that gives us twenty minutes of the "Neighborhood" cycle (broken up by the quirky "Une Annee Sans Lumiere") before switching gears to a series of massive anthems whose sentimentality is outweighed only by their gravitas. When Funeral says something is important, you better believe it.

The first two "Neighborhoods" are good examples, the contrasting "Tunnels" - about the righteous struggle of building a community - and "Power Out" - about the perverse thrill of watching it all burn.





But, as Spike Jonze confirmed, "Wake Up" packs the biggest punch as a eulogy for childhood ("Our bodies get bigger/But our hearts get torn up") and a halting acceptance of the freedoms and responsibilities of adulthood ("I guess we'll just have to adjust").



As I mentioned, Arcade Fire traffics in the biggest and broadest of feelings but in this they are nearly unparalleled. Empathy is their strength, and emotional validation is their best promotional tool. The less specific they are, the better.

Neon Bible strays from this winning formula - a transparently conceptual record, it's also a bit too preachy in spots. However, it does score a couple direct hits on the meddlesome role of religion in modern life with the eerily calm "Neon Bible" and the reverberating "Intervention."


("Intervention," by the way, will never fail to spoil the cheerful mood on karaoke night, no matter how profundo your basso)

"Keep the Car Running" has more of the band's signature wild abandon, but I think "(Antichrist Television Blues)" is the heart of the record, and the high water mark of Arcade Fire as a "conceptual" group. The song's protagonist is admitting harsh truths about the most omnipresent forces in his life - God, family, the media - but at the same time is desperate to please these idols, pre-emptively offering up his firstborn to the TV industry. Thus, a reality star is born.



Scrutiny is also a resonant theme in Arcade Fire's body of work, including "Windowsill" from Bible and one of the first leaks from The Suburbs, "Rococo," a disturbing and dismissive evaluation of profligate hipster culture and its dangerous king-making powers.



There is some sense that Suburbs is about a twentysomething's return to the titular subdivisions, with all the attendant judgments and tut-tutting as heard in the Todd Rundgren-influenced "Modern Man." But there is no real advancement of a false dichotomy nor do they dwell on the Springsteen-lite philosophizing that they are inexplicably known for (presumably these critics have never heard of The Hold Steady). They are blessedly aware that the grass is always greener. There's time for play, too, as on "City With No Children," which puts a euphoric slant on the Stones' "Street Fighting Man."



The issue of emotional validation crops up again in "Month of May," a punkish bob-and-weave that twists Aristotelian advice into the supposition that a life unexamined by others is not worth living. Life for Gen Y is just one long, award-winning documentary ("Two thousand nine/Two thousand ten/Wanna make a record 'bout I felt then").



"We Used to Wait" saves the best for (almost) last with a bracing description of Western ennui. Along with the "Sprawl" duology, it takes aim at the complacency that's suffocating enough to inspire caustic reminiscence but comfortable enough to preclude drastic action. They know the price of stability is unfulfilled wishes ("We used to wait/Sometimes it never came").



But Arcade Fire doesn't come to bury dreams. On the contrary, they are here to celebrate them - "Wait" is sung in the past tense, ultimately a song of optimism and try-it-again from hope's House band.

Apes and Androids to Aqua

Apes and Androids - Blood Moon
Blood Moon lies prostrate at the feet of Beck and Prince with a heaping helping of funk mythology borrowed from Funkadelic. The spaceship that descends in "Blood Moon I" is the vessel for the "Riders on the storm," to borrow a lyric from the hypnotically officious "Make Forever Last Forever"; the latter is just one of the many commandments from the would-be interstellar gods of Apes and Androids. The fact that they're really glam versions of the Cobra Kai kids is only mildly deflating.



Blood Moon is really a prism for a single fantasy about a giant space glitter party, refracting this central theme through a handful of different styles as to keep it interesting. "Radio," for one, entertains with a vaguely Oriental swing and "Hot Kathy" is some pretty inventive Paisley Park weirdness.

It all comes to a head in the rapturous mid-record anthem "Nights of the Week," which steals an excellent riff from the Police's "Message in a Bottle," chops it into dozens of little pieces, and tosses them into the sweat and shimmer of the band's hardcore night-owl milieu. It's a thrilling summation of "the scene," applicable as long as young people with more stamina than perspective convene to cause one in claustrophobic spaces.



My only gripe is that too many of the songs on the album's back nine come off as Radiohead retreads. The entire record seems long in the tooth, actually. 18 songs is hefty for a debut. And yet I'm thankful for this excess - the mercurial group of New Yorkers disbanded in 2009, a year after releasing this, their only LP. Turns out it wasn't the stirrings of a true glam rock revival but a pit stop before a return to the Mothership. It's kind of nice to find a band that exits as inscrutably as it enters.

Apostle of Hustle - "I Want A New Drug"
In the summer of 2007, a group of friends planted the seeds of a staggeringly awesome project entitled Are You Still With Me?!, a full album of indie rock covers of songs by Huey Lewis and the News. Like most attempts to redeem the 1980s, it was too good to be true. Three years later we have only the meager fruits of the labor of (mostly) C-list indie rockers. The majority of the proposed tracklist used to be available on an all-you-can-listen buffet of a MySpace page, but the project has stalled for so long that only a few lonely MP3s wander across the Internet, tantalizing the public with what might have been. This thing is the Smile of indie rock covers of 80s pop superstars.



Apostle of Hustle's contribution is, in my opinion, one of the weaker efforts solicited. It is a darker and surprisingly menacing version of the smash hit from 1983's Sports, performed by people who could be talking about actual drugs (as in, I'm tired of these psychotropics, I think I will try painkillers next). Something is lost in the translation.

Aqua - "Barbie Girl"
It is abundantly clear that Scandinavians prefer their pop music to lack pretense (well, most of them, anyway). Aqua's "Barbie Girl" pushes the envelope even further, an airhead anthem for an airhead icon. People complain about the likes of Ke$ha now, but keep in mind that 13 years ago this was a top 10 U.S. single:



Mattel, however, wasn't laughing. They took a break from peddling juvenilized femininity to sue Aqua, which resulted in one of the most appropriately flippant rulings in judicial history: "The parties are advised to chill."

It's kitsch. It's boomerang sideburns. It's the sound of being eight months away from never working again. It's "Barbie Girl."

Antony and the Johnsons

To save my sanity, I'm trying a new strategy - listening and writing in smaller chunks. Let's get minimal.

Antony and the Johnsons - The Crying Light
Antony Hegary is an otherworldly transgender chanteuse with a voice that makes him sound like he's perpetually about to burst into tears. I can handle it in measured doses. I suspect that he and his band, the Johnsons, appeal most to two very different segments of the same niche, one that staunchly believes the opera should pull the same attendance as Spamalot and one that still thinks The Rocky Horror Picture Show is edgy and subversive.

The Crying Light is schticky, an eco-concept album that reverses the traditional contextual problem of concept albums - out of context, several of the songs are so exquisite they turn you into the type of baroque weenie who uses the word "exquisite" in casual conversation. In context, however, the record's earnestness borders on cheesy. "I'm gonna miss the wind/Been kissing me so long" Hegarty warbles on "Another World," a laundry list of the things that will disappear when the world hits full Goremageddon.

"Epilepsy Is Dancing" illustrates this discrepancy very well. A neat metaphor about creativity and the unquiet mind that hits all the right bittersweet notes, it's an out-of-context delight. But put it in the context of Hegarty's fevered imagination and its vision hews pretty close to that of a overgrown drama nerd. And you get this...

[Warning: theatre boobies ahead....NSFW]




Despite the Johnsons' somewhat discouraging resemblance in image to early Jamiroquai - what with the environmentalism and the elaborate chapeaus - their music, thankfully, is more like Secretly Canadian labelmate Jens Lekman. "Daylight and the Sun" and "Aeon" prove that their darker brand of cabaret can too reach soaring heights and overcome the distractions posed by Hegarty's voice. Unfortunately, when The Crying Light aims for anything less than a grandiose emotional impact, the result is always tempered by some loss of affect - unless the intended effect was always to remind the listener of weeping unicorns shuffling across a kabuki stage.