Arcade Fire - An Intro to an Interlude

I've mentioned this before- I'm quite worn down by my music project lately. I've acutally enjoyed a lot of the recent music on the list. But even that can be seen as a sign that I'm wearing down. In my recent reviews of A Grand Don't Come For Free and Welcome To The Afterfuture I admitted to sorta liking them, and they're rap albums. I'm definitely getting soft. When the next album on my randomly generated order turned out to be by Wu Tang Clan, I decided it was time for a break.

And I've decided to vacation with these people. They look fun, right?

I've decided to jump ahead in my list to a band that vexes me possibly quite irrationally. I was first introduced to Arcade Fire by The Daily Show I'm guessing in 2010. That would be when they were on tour for The Suburbs, which was so far their biggest album. First of all it's just weird for a musical act to be taking up time on The Daily Show. I know it's a late-night comedy show that often plugs movies by interviewing actors, but since staking claim to the satirical watchdog moniker a live music act seems out of place. In any case, Jon Stewart introduced Arcade Fire to me and I watched as what appeared to be twenty musicians played a boring 2-chord bit of nothingness. I've said this before- it's fascinating to see a dozen people on stage play music that would sound the same with only 3 or 4 people.

"My interns told me my hipster cred fell by 10 percent last month, so here's Pitchfork's most popular band."

I forgot about Arcade Fire for a while, but then came the 2011 Grammy Awards. You might remember that year as the one where Lady Gaga was delivered to the awards in a giant egg. I remember it as that year Arcade Fire started to drive me nuts, because The Suburbs won album of the year. This was apparently a huge deal because Arcade Fire was still considered an indie-rock group, a genre I continuously lament existing. Here's what I wrote on my facebook page after reading about Arcade Fire's win:

"Arcade Fire won Album of the Year. It could be worse. At the very least, they are a group of actual musicians who play actual instruments. I thought such popular groups were gone forever. But I'm still bothered by Arcade Fire. A Salon.com article had this to say: 'By the time they closed out the awards with 'Ready to Start,' radiant with victory for album of the year, they had officially crossed over from that lush, moody group you play in your bedroom to Springsteen and U2 territory.' Hyperbole, much? I guess all they need now is one dead member to move into the Beatles/Led Zeppelin territory. Maybe I'm not so much bothered by the band as I am by the hype. Or maybe it's their lame, unwashed, hipster identity. It's not the music, that's perfectly vanilla, if a little whiny."

This was my second exposure to Arcade Fire, but not long after I started noticing lots of people on the internet really loved their music. There were myriad articles about the anticipation surrounding their soon-to-come fourth album on music pages for months. Bloggers I frequented would post links to their live performance videos. Even Paul Krugman would tell me how much he loved the group in his primarily economics-based blog. But most pertinent to my cause, the last edition of 1,001 Albums To Hear Before You Die included all 3 Arcade Fire albums that had been released to that point (2011).

"Popular music could really use more accordian." - No One Ever.

As I did with my Beatles Interlude, in trying to decipher what the big fucking deal is I've decided to listen to Arcade Fire's entire studio catalogue. Luckily I'm doing this after the band has only released 4 studio albums. (I guess I could also count the film score to Her, but it's not officially an Arcade Fire album.) I'm just glad I don't have to scour internet sources to find all of the non-album singles and EP's the band released and tabulate them in chronological order. Doing that for The Beatles took me a couple weeks to get right.

What do I hope to learn from this experience? Is there really anything I can learn from 4 albums? I'm not really sure. I just hope that somewhere on these upcoming albums the group does more with their essemble than play 2 power chords like I heard that night on The Daily Show. It would also be nice to know why lead singer Edwin Farnham Butler III has decided to go with "Win Butler" as his name. I guess "Ed Butler" just sounds too ordinary.

This is he... The man they call, "Win."

On a side note, if I ever decide to form a band I might go by my hipster name of Id Klopotoski. Regardless, I'm unlikely to get an answer to that question just listening to his music.