Low and behold, I completely missed Arcade Fire's debut album on my original runthrough of reviewing their catalogue. In fact, The Internet lied to me. I went to the band's Wikipedia page, which judging from it's length is completely edited by die-hard fans. Under the Discography section it only lists Funeral, Neon Bible, The Suburbs, and Reflektor. When I went to the Funeral page, it states up-front that it is Arcade Fire's debut album. I didn't find any mention of the Arcade Fire EP until I went to the seperate discography page which conspicuously hides it in the middle.
So I'm reviewing this out-of-order, which isn't really my fault. If the band wants to hide that this material existed they did a pretty good job. One further note... this supposed "extended play" is 8 songs and 33 minutes long. That's not an extended play, that's an album. Maybe standards have changed in recent years, but if slightly more than half an hour doesn't count as an album anymore that's just ridiculous. Under those standards, The Beatles would only have 3 legitimate albums with Sgt. Pepper barely qualifying at 39 minutes. Bands like Green Day would probably have zero legitimate albums... which wouldn't be that different from reality.
Arcade Fire EP doesn't really deserve a deep dive of a review. From what I've read the initial release was done for fans at their shows and around the same time they were shopping around for someone to release Funeral. So the EP can really be thought of as junk they didn't want to officially release, and it shows. For one this album sounds like crap. It's scratchy, muffled, and warbly, even more so than I would expect from Win Butler. The mix isn't very good- the bass is really clear while the drums are washed out, creating an unbalanced feel. And the music itself is outtake quality, not approaching even the macabre level of Funeral. So anyone looking to take a deep dive into Arcade Fire should feel OK skipping this.
1 star, because I honestly expected much better.
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