Arcade Fire Wins Over Bearded Man

There’s a certain point/counterpoint at work here: hype vs. skills. No doubt these guys are on an impossibly sharp arc, Icarus-level flying from complete obscurity to critical darling to pop powerhouse. And yet, we’ve all heard Funeral — it’s more than a good album, it’s a near-masterpiece. I’ve even seen these guys live once or twice, and they absolutely killed it. That chocolate is mighty tasty.

Still, their follow-up has to be one of the most highly anticipated sophomore efforts in a long while, and these shows…oh, these shows: For such a you’re-not-getting-a-ticket ticket in a room that was way, way too small to meet the demand, the whole thing was a little too easy. All those usual imps of live-music-going in the big bad city kind of made themselves scarce, carted away by a team of Oompah Loompahs like so many Gloops, Salts and Teevees before them.

I would’ve thought, arriving at 7:45 for a nominal 8 pm doors, that I would’ve been waiting in the sub-arctic cold for at least a half hour, and yet we waltzed right inside. The doors had already been open for 15 minutes. I would’ve thought that once inside we would have been relegated to the back, but the place was less than half-full and we found a nice spot dead center. I would’ve thought that by the time the lights went down that we would have been pressing flesh with the hipster elite surrounding us, but we had plenty of room, enough for a pile of thick winter coats on the floor between us. I would’ve thought that the band, drunk on their own darling status, would have kept us waiting in rock-star fashion for at least 30 or 40 minutes, but they actually started a good five minutes before the ticket-stated showtime. So long Augustus, farewell sweet Veruca…

The venue was nothing short of gorgeous, a true sensory treat. We stood surrounded on all sides by wonderful stained glass while a “neon bible” flashed above the stage. The lights went down and away we go!

The Arcade Fire is more of a collective than a band: 10 men and women scattered across the stage with probably dozens of different instruments. Each member played at least two different instruments during the course of the set, and most played many more than that. Horns (French, trumpet, bassoon, et al), strings, guitars (so many guitars: acoustic, electric, slide and everything in between), keyboards (piano, their own pipe organ fer crissakes, a mini Moog and more), basses (stand-up and electric), percussion, glockenspiel, drums, cymbals, megaphones…all pieces of the whole, all contributing to the sound.

There were also several pieces that I can’t put a name to, unique and many certainly vintage, a big metallic, mandolin/lute-ish thing and a couple mystery boxes that added that special something here and there. The energy in the room was almost a giddy freakout as the show began. The hype and build-up had crested to reality, and the crowd, as boisterous and fun an audience as I’ve been a part of in quite a while, nibbled and bit at the big, fat Wonka Bar on stage.

But, as the first number or two got us warmed up, a very glaring issue reared its head. As had been rumored, the sound was nothing short of atrocious. Certainly it could have been worse, but not much so: The bass drum seemed to be an oversized behemeth, swallowing all sounds in its midst.

All those instruments must be balanced just so, and without the proper mix, all the brilliant subtlety of the songs is lost. While the church was a one-of-a-kind venue, a special room for a special show (as Jon Pareles noted), it’s not really equipped for the enormity of the Arcade Fire sound. Forcing these 10 musicians through that PA was like forcing Seurat to use a paint roller, those ever-important details lost in giant daubs of boomy low end.

After three or four songs of devoting a lot of energy to just hearing the music and not just feeling the gist of it, things seemed to clear up. We all agreed on this afterward — it just wasn’t clear if the sound had gotten better or if our ears had just adjusted themselves on the fly. No matter, the pure energy of the band was enough to carry us over the rough patches.

These guys take nothing for granted and are working their asses off 100 percent of the time, and such enthusiasm is completely infectious. Pulsing beams of electromagnetism emanated from the stage draw you in completely. I’m not much of a song title guy, and the set doesn’t really deserved to be parsed like that. They did play almost entirely new material, I assume off their forthcoming album. There wasn’t a song in there that lost me, even those first few that kind of came at us like big waves of sound; never bored, totally engaged from the first note to the last.

The musicians were constantly buzzing around in perpetual motion, a swarm of bees doing a complicated dance, each with his own role in the collective. The crowd ate it up completely — it was church and the music was our bible. Watching these guys play is such a treat, an Arcade Fire show is what live music is all about. They make you dance, they make you listen hard, they confound you and they make it so very, very easy, but most of all it’s just a helluva lot of fun. They don’t take themselves too seriously and yet they’re making some serious music.

The collective notion is really strong: There are guys up front and there are guys hanging back, but there is no doubt that it’s all important. At times I couldn’t hear things I wished I could. The French horns seemed to disappear and re-appear all night, and then there were some sounds that were tickling the inside of my brain and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where they were coming from.

But the set was perfectly constructed. The songs didn’t matter, because each flowed into the next, a singular building wave. It was music, but it was more than that, too, the anticipation wasn’t matched exactly, but the sum of everything — the energy in the room, the brilliant lighting, the beauty of the church, all the little sounds and all the great big ones — made it an event. When they reached the 2/3 point of the set and they finally broke into the little Funeral material they played, I thought the place was going to explode.

I’m sure someone else can point out the two tunes they played, but it was pure electricity at this point, as the two brilliantly flowed one directly into the next, sending a smile across everyone’s face. A song or two more and it was over as quickly as it had started. A clean hour of non-stop Arcade Fire, utterly scrumdiddlyumptious.

They came back out so quickly for the encore that they barely had time to soak in their due applause. No worries, they got right back into it, laying down a nice, quieter number, about as close to an acoustic ballad as these guys are going to get. After that one, just when it appeared that they were done, they each grabbed something portable and started to make their way down to the crowd.

I realized that they were coming into the crowd to play one more tune, but what I didn’t realize was that Willy Wonka was going to be taking me on a personal ride in his glass elevator…but lo and behold they came right to the dead center of the room, right where we were standing and the next thing I know, there is nothing standing between me and Arcade Fire. They broke into “Wake Up” and I had no choice but to roll film. So as I bid adieu here, in a few parts to make it more uploadable, is most of the last tune from Thursday’s show (sorry for poor quality, audio issues, etc.):

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And now, a special download for you:

Arcade Fire 320kbps 2/13/07 mp3s:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/iteroo

Arcade Fire
February 13, 2007
Judson Memorial Church
New York City, NY

01. Keep the Car Running
02. (Antichrist Television Blues)
03. Black Mirror
04. Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son [France Gall]
05. No Cars Go
06. Haiti
07. Black Wave/Bad Vibrations
08. My Body is a Cage
09. Neon Bible
10. Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)
11. Rebellion (Lies)
12. Intervention
13. encore break
14. Windowsill
15. The Well and the Lighthouse

Source: sp-cmc-8 > sp-spsb-1 > mz-rh910 (line in, lpcm)
Transfer: mz-rh910 > usb > SonicStage 3.3 > wav > Cool Edit (2:1 > -1db dynamic compressor to back off peaking) > CD Wave (tracking) > flac 1.1.1 (level 6)

Previously on Hidden Track: Our First Taste of Arcade Fire at Judson; Arcade Fire & Brimstone Redux; The Arcade Fire & Brimstone

• Click here for more amazing photos by Ben Oxenburg