The Arcade Fire
Friday night I had the pleasure of watching The Arcade Fire perform live at Emo’s in Austin. While I was falling in love with their album Funeral last year I made the obligatory web crawl to find out about live dates. This was during the first leg of their Funeral tour, so dates were few and in a radius of their native Montreal. I wrote an email to the contact address listed on their web site begging them to come to Austin. Someone wrote back to tell me that they were responding to all the recent attention the band was getting by extending the tour, and that they were definetely going to be coming through the southwest in early 2005. Satisfied for the time being, I settled back into absorbing and proselytizing the album and waited.
Last week, after reading an article about a Christmas EP the band put out a few years ago and watching a clip of their live show I decided to check up on their tour. Low and behold, Austin, TX on Friday January 21, 2005 at Emo’s. The mailing list had been completely silent, but my keen spider senses kicked in and saved the day. Tickets were purchased, and I began my campaign of bugging Jon every day to do the same.
So it could be said that I was excited when we (finally) made it to Emo’s. We had to wait in line for a while to pick up our tickets at will-call (the show was sold out), but before long we were inside and anxiously waiting. In the time it took to grab a few beers and locate a reasonable spot to watch the band had taken the stage to cries of jubilation from the crowd. I love attending shows like this one because you can be sure that almost every single person in attendance is there because they love the music, and not because it was just something to do in Austin on a Friday.
They opened with “Wake Up”, a real crowd pleaser, but it was pretty quiet. The dance club next door was overpowering the PA at Emo’s and would become quite a distraction as the evening progressed.
By the time they started the second song, “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)”, I was completely oblivious to any deficiencies in the environment around me. It is only in retrospect that I am able to pick out problems with the experience. During the performance I was lost, completely enthralled by the Canadian sextet before me, playing their hearts out and dragging us all into their world of love and loss and longing.
It’s hard to explain the show without getting down to its emotional core. For example, I always knew “Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)” was a mournful tale of love, death and unfulfilled expectations, but their performance of it added a sanctity that I hadn’t detected before. While the slightest brushings of violin floated over Win Butler’s guitar, Régine Chassagne gazed at the audience through a triangle made of two xylophone mallets and a drumstick. The sound of the club next door was invading and everyone on stage except for Régine had their eyes closed, concentrating. Régine looked worried, and she kept looking at Win in a concerned way (they are married), as if she knew how important this song was to him and was afraid that this place wasn’t sacred enough for it. I felt myself entering the circle with them, trying to push out the distractions and connect with what was being built, to add my own strength to theirs so that they could fully realize not just the composition, but the palpable energy that was accompanying it. When the song finally kicked off, I felt a wave of relief and satisfaction and a new appreciation for this understated song.
It’s always difficult to convey any experience in a satisfactory way, but thanks to The Miracle of the Internet you can listen to this show as if you were in the audience. Concert tape trading has fully embraced technology to speed it along, and the online communities involved in the creation and distribution of these recording are extremely active. The Traders Den allows anyone to sign up and start sharing, and one trader posted an audience recording of this show. The sound is much fuller than I remembered, and I now wish I had tried harder to get a better spot in the crowd.
So, the moral of the story is listen to The Arcade Fire. If they don’t succumb to The Curse of the Strong Debut they will go on to do great things. You can pick up their CD over at Merge Records.