Atomic Melodrama

Happy New Arcade Fire Day!

David Fricke (Rolling Stone) didn't give it the best review, but historically, he and I don't always agree anyhow. Somehow, in his pathetic attempts at condemnation (I say pathetic since he couldn't outright say what he didn't like, he just danced around it, which I think is something of the point of Arcade Fire to begin with; do you remember when the EP came out and no one really said they didn't like it, but more critiqued it, and then it gained such a base that no one could even pan Haiti in Funeral, or worse, In the Backseat, which is really an awful song and someone should have just SAID so) but, he did say some things that I found not only appropriate, but actually kind of elegantly correct. Given what he's said about the references, I'm not sure he means it as a compliment, but given how I feel about them, I'm taking it as totally fabulous. and couldn't agree more.

"on Neon Bible, the reverb is so big and black that the beat becomes boom and the orchestral garnish, arranged by Chassagne and Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett, gets pressed to the margins. The result is a huge sound that only sparkles on the edges, leaving Butler alone in the middle, railing against rising tides, falling bombs and the nonstop rain of shit on television like he's singing from the pulpit of an empty cathedral.

Maybe that was the idea. Neon Bible is an aggressively gothic record, explicitly so in the pipe organ that soars over the hunger and wreckage in "Intervention." More intriguing are "Black Mirror" and "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations," which somehow combine the oppressive dread on Side Two of David Bowie's Low with the church-bells-in-the-rain reveille of U2's Boy. "Neon Bible" is even bleaker, a soft two-minute eulogy for a generation blinded by chain-store signs and laptop-computer glow. "A vial of hope and a vial of pain/In the light, they both looked the same," Butler sings through whispering cellos and child-angel harmonies, like Leonard Cohen wandering through the third Velvet Underground album.

But there is determined resistance here too, a twisted faith in escape that comes through best when Arcade Fire hit the gas pedal. " for full: http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/13467688/review/13544415/neon_bible

Me, I'm partial to the well and the lighthouse. and the one about the King and the Queen. And (obviously) Keep the Car Running, which I've been bouncing around my lair too for so long it's actually started running through my dreams.

Today is hipster day, apparently. I even have the hat to prove it.