arcade fire by chris gregori

A Week With Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible": Day 3

12 March 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by David Bevan // Illustration by Chris Gregori

Consider: Which nuggets of The Arcade Fire’s discography would Greg Gillis of Girl Talk fame fiddle around with if struck suddenly by an urge to fuse the swells of Funeral or Neon Bible with the rhythmic tangles spat by Rakim? Or maybe the sore-throated exorcisms of Marshall Mathers?

That shit makes you think.

After so many days of sitting in the corner with the band’s latest, it’s difficult to get a sense of its many hooks and barbs. They aren’t the type to leave awful tears in the soft soft flesh of your face, but of a much more subtle ilk. It’s safe to repeat that this record won’t change lives, nor will it effectively ready the masses for Bono and his many costume changes. But it will creep its way into heavy rotation and that’s good news. You’re now listening to a band with two albums under its belt, both brilliant in their own rights.

“Antichrist Television Blues” is ingenious, leaning heavily on the imagery perfected by Springsteen while skewering deftly the evil that is Joe Simpson. That would be the father of Jessica and that, if it were true, deserves both mention and handsome reward. Perhaps more significantly, “Antichrist Television Blues” serves very well as album centerpiece. It maintains a lissome swirl of the many elements that have made The Arcade Fire’s approach to songwriting — and perhaps even performing — so appealing. The song moves and vibrates and screams in languages you wish you could learn, strings massage vocal harmonies and vice versa. Butler hops from whisper to hacksaw staccato in short stretches, never losing the intensity or galloping momentum that is the lifeblood of revelation in song.

It’s the rough equivalent of shedding tears of happiness, all the while dancing as though it was your last time on the parquet.

That all this beautiful noise is coming from a band whose fashion sensibility is as macabre as Eminem’s cemetery musings helps it all go down so much smoother. Undertaker chic trumps track pants and gold chains just about every day of the week.

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