Heart on a Stick
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Adoniram (Arcade Fire, Judson Memorial Church, 2/15/07)
posted 02/18/2007
The Arcade Fire must be a pretty great band. Because there’s been an awful lot of awful writing about it.
I’m not being sarcastic. Or superior: I’ve contributed to the cause, and it looks like I’m about to do so again. But every positive thing I’ve read has either been dryly analytical and expository – an inherently inadequate approach – or so gushy I’ve been tempted to slip in an extra Maxi-pad. It’s an inevitable effect of a system which names a Band-of-the-Day every fifty-nine minutes, of the incessant souq-hype screaming “Bestest! Mostest! Hottest!” All! The! Time! that, when something of significant quality comes along, people have to react like they’re staring into the face of God. Every aural divot must have “majestic grandeur.” Everything’s so fucking capital-T Transcendent you’d think we’d need air traffic controllers for the fucking astral plane.
And I submit that, given current circumstances, this is a good thing. More is more, now, no going back. It may make for a lot of horrible reading – and yes, I’ve read x, and I’ve seen z, and I tried yours, too, up to the point where I wanted to start stabbing my eyes with a penknife – but in a world of upwardly mobile superlatives, where we’ve redefined “bearable” as “great” and “mediocre” as “awesome,” someone’s gotta find a new way to say that something’s good. It’s not a pretty process, and sometimes the sound of the struggle’s all you’ve got to go by.
Yup. Everything that’s been written about Arcade Fire has been written badly. If you need to quantify just how good they are, ignore sales figures and Pitchfork ratings and such; just print all the shit up, throw it in a gravel pit, set it aflame. Count how many days it burns.
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“It’s good to be in a church.”
Preacher Edward Judson conceived Judson Memorial Church as a memorial to his father, who had: Rebelled against his own minister father. Rejected Christianity. Moved to New York in a failed bid to become a playwright. Returned to his parents and religion, then jumped continents and denominations. Spent seventeen torturous months in a Burmese prison. Been married three times, widowed twice. Watched six of his twelve children die young, including all three by his first wife.(*)
Though he spent 37 years abroad as a missionary and left behind one hundred churches, eight thousand converts, and the world’s first Burmese Bible, you can’t help but feel that Adoniram Judson’s relationship with his God was a complicated one.
Standing on the south side of Washington Square Park and not yet completely smothered by NYU, Judson was conceived as a progressive institution and has remained one. How many church websites mention their endorsement of legalized prostitution? Back when I was in school, Judson kept a running tally of Iraqi war dead on its outdoor message board; this was Gulf War I, when no one else really cared. Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler, speaking from the stage Thursday night, said he’d spent all afternoon with “the coolest people in the world,” watching as they'd put together packets for the church’s needle-exchange program.
Montreal’s Arcade Fire (myspace) is – you know this – a rock band built around Texas-born Butler and his wife, Régine Chassagne. Their second full-length album, Neon Bible, comes out March 6th on Merge Records (pre-order here). It is better than their first, Funeral, which a lot of people liked. Which a lot of people liked a lot.
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Funeral drew much of its power from fabulized, self-aware denial. Struggle is redefined as celebration. Dead parents are sleeping, frozen; police lights are discotheques. Children run wild, little hellions using lightning bolts to light their way. Look at them go, look at them go!
The sound is anthemic and accessible. On much of Funeral the band takes the Cure/Bunnymen strain of Brit post-punk and sucks the moan out of it, warms it with piano and accordion, shores it up with all their friends. Several Arcade Fire songs come in halves; there will be a moment mid-song where the band either embraces or rejects its dilemma. “Crown of Love” starts as begging ballad, winds up demanding disco. “Wake Up” goes from full-throated whole-note howl to bouncy girl-group smash.
Lyrically and musically, the record’s conclusions are explicit: Move on. Less candy-coated than caramelized, there’s a power necessary non-answers hold. Though its counsel (“I guess we’ll just have to adjust?” “The power’s out in the heart of man, take it from your heart put it in your hand?”) might not come as bumper-sticker-ready as a Dr. Phil maxim, both serve the same purpose. They patch you up, push you on, help you continue.
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Wait: We got through yesterday. You mean we’ve got to get through today, too?
Neon Bible is no self-help book.
“My body is a cage,” the summary track on the record says, “that keeps me from dancing with the one I love.” It begins as dirge and heartbeat, builds to a rapturous explosion, ends with a plea. “Set my spirit free, set my body free.”
[Because the album’s not yet officially available (again, pre-order here), because the live mp3s from the show this week really expose how weak Win's voice was – and because you can probably already find plenty of it here, anyway – I offer this up as an interpretive dance:]
Death is held out as a promise. “World War III, when are you coming for me?” Our destination is “between the click of the light and the start of the dream.” The split songs here don’t offer answers, they frustrate; they’ll start fast, end slow. Someone trapped by greed at the bottom of a well finds themselves denied an end; they’re reborn and trapped by duty at the top of a lighthouse. In “Black Wave/Bad Vibrations” a driving escape to the sea is stomped out. Now it’s not about getting through, it’s about getting away. Keep the car running. But we’ve got to get where no cars go.
It’s a death trap, a suicide rap. Baby, we were born to run.
The band injects a lot of Bruuuce into Bible(**), and does so in ways that make sense. The Hold Steady needed a crutch, The Killers craved some integrity. Arcade Fire recognizes in Springsteen, I think, someone who puts across harrowing, depressing stories in a compelling and charismatic way. They already had a full sound, the bright glock and piano. If you’re going to write verse-heavy songs with lines like “I was working downtown for the minimum wage” you’d pretty much better throw down a boogie beat and call in The Boss.
“Antichrist Television Blues” – a song supposedly about Joe Simpson (father to Jessica and Ashley, a former preacher himself, and a man who seems torn between wanting to squeeze every last dollar out his daughter and just wanting to squeeze them) – is the strongest nod to Springsteen, but it’s also a good example of what makes this band so great.
They are capable, and they are communicative. You don’t need to follow songs like street maps – good thing, because sometimes they’re singing in French, and they toss around so much light and water imagery you won’t know whether you’re being blinded or baptized – because they’re empathetic and expressive enough to get you where you need to go. And they’re capable of taking you into desperate, prideful, guilty places like Joe Simpson’s head.
Without making you feel like you have to shower five hundred times afterwards.
(“Wanna hold the mirror up to the world so that they can see themselves inside my little girl,” by the way, winks in a way this band’s lyrics almost never do. This band’s too smart, and too concerned, to be clever. So maybe that’s not a wink. Maybe that’s an involuntary twitch.)
They’re a great band because almost everything they do feels natural, and when they fail – yes, some lyrics sound silly – they seem to fail because they’re after something unattainable. Neon Bible doesn’t attack religion, doesn’t explain religion; it finds the existential dread that makes people look toward religion in the first place.
So: Win Butler – Edwin Farnham Butler III – stands in Judson Memorial Church and sings, “I don’t wanna live in my father’s house no more.” There might be something in there – in here, in this room – about why Butler went off to prep school in far-away New England at age 15, or not. Something about his father, who was a geologist for an oil company; or about his father, who was a boatbuilder. Something about George W. and George H.W.; something about Jesus, or his Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed blahblahblah. Or not. And tonight, there might be something in that line about Edward Judson, and his father Adoniram, and his father Adoniram. And you. You’re here, too, with all your fathers, and all your fathers’ father’s houses.
Funeral was kid stuff. That’s not an insult. It had songs for childish urges – bless those – and songs from children. But while its subjects can be petty, even bratty, Neon Bible is grown-up. It’s not seeking, or offering, explanations; it’s asking for understanding.
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“Thank you for coming to my Bar Mitzvah,” Butler jokes, noting that all of the parts in the new songs he’d sing tonight were written an octave-and-a-half lower than Funeral’s. “I guess my balls must have dropped.”
Touring behind the last album’s material, Arcade Fire established themselves as an amazing, intense live band. It makes sense: Funerals are for the living. You gather, look death in the face, go away stronger. Celebrate your alive-ness. The band went out and found a million new friends. They all celebrated that, together.
Unfortunately the Bible songs don’t encourage the same reaction. While they’re not mopey, and while they’re tuneful and moving, they just don’t cut loose. Beautiful music’s still being made, and the crowd gamely bounced and clapped along Thursday night, but celebration’s been replaced by... what? Commiseration?
Butler coughed about having been sick all week – “My body is a cage... of disgusting sickness” – but the energy level seemed much, much lower than the two previous times I’ve seen the group. There was still the incessant instrument-changing (I figure they pick assignments from a hat, or have some sort of spinning wheel; right hand on green, and on song #3 Colin has to play bass clarinet...), but few insane outbursts. Richard Reed Parry was especially subdued; perhaps he was sick of the spazzy Napoleon Dynamite comparisons – he’s lost his glasses, too. Then again, perhaps he was just sick of the glasses. Or, like Butler, just sick.
Régine was her goofy, glowing self (she wore her light-up Spider-Woman gloves, but they never lit up). Will Butler (Win’s brother) was the sole source of chaos, once taking one of the group’s mounted megaphones and shoving it against his sister-in-law’s ear, screaming into it as its siren blared. Silly and marvelous.
As far as scheduled spectacle went, the band’s two French horn players and a trumpet player (Butler called them “The Angels of Gabriel” – the now-ten-piece band seems to have absorbed an entire side-project) sneaked into the balcony for the climactic portion of “Cage.” The last song of the night was a sort of acoustic (accordion, violin, horn, trumpet, guitar, tom and tambourine) streetcorner version of “Wake Up,” performed from the center of the church floor.
[There are three versions of this performance on YouTube: This one has very good sound but no picture; this one has okay sound, but the video’s so shaky it’d make Lars von Trier nauseous, and one had a great vantage point but is annoyingly split into 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 sections. Web 2.0!]
I hope they keep sticking that same song in the same spot in the show. End the night with it. Let it become tradition. It’s a great song to bond performer to audience, and – and that sound everyone’s making throughout? That exuberant roar? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, lo’ these many pages. That’s how you pronounce the word that every awful bit of music writing about this band’s been trying to find.
Pass it on.
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Oh, what the hell, let’s drag this nugget out:
For a great live mp3 of "Wake Up" from Friday night's performance, go to ryspace.
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This show was mid-way through the band’s five-night stand at Judson. The church has hosted arts events since the ‘50s, but mostly avant-garde artists (the “grandaddy of downtown art” – Yoko wuz here). This is clearly a promotional push; when Butler said it was “good to be in a church,” it’s not as if it was an unusual place for him to be: The band’s studio is a (deconsecrated?) church outside Montreal, and the group just played several nights of its London stand in a church, there. It’s part of the plan. The album’s called Neon Bible, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to flood the media with photos of your CD’s glowing symbol in its natural habitat. Mall tours are so very 1987.
[It is a cool series of shows, and several things have been done very, very right – including non-transferable tickets, and a good number of stand-bys for those willing to wait. But the overpriced tickets for what were supposedly “warm-up shows” (****) – well, I hope a bunch of that dough went the church’s way. This is a great band, with a great attitude and a great rapport with the crowd. I’d hate to see them become unreachable. That’s all I’m saying.]
The main room – oh, my technical church-speak – feels just slightly smaller than the Bowery Ballroom, though the performance area isn’t as wide and the balcony doesn’t extend along the sides. The pews (assuming there are usually pews) were up, away. The pulpit is set inside an archway under a large, round stained glass window. Beneath the window hung a neon Neon Bible. The archway was lit with uniform colors – blue, green, purple, orange (Kathryn Yu has a striking set of pics here).
Acoustics were a problem, but not a tragic one. I was about a third of the way back and the music was less muddy than imprecise. Vocals were clear – a lot clearer than a lot of shows I’ve seen in normal venues – but there wasn’t any noticeable difference when they started singing through megaphones. Brighter sounds stood out – the mandolin was sharp – but the hurdy-gurdy’s drone wasn’t distinct from the violin and viola, the horns were a bit too tucked away. I neither expected nor needed this to be Dolby-certified event. Drums boom. I can deal with that.
That stand-up bass – is it wood that’s painted silver, or some kind of brushed aluminum?
There were church organ pipes along the wall behind the pulpit, but they did not use the church organ for the church organ parts. Disappointing. Also, no one playfully ripped out Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor, which should be the very first thing you do when fucking around with music in a church.
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Our blogging is a cage:
Tuesday, 2/13: Fluxblog, Gothamist, NY Times, Ohmpark (live mp3s), Product Shop NYC, Snakes Got a Blog, Stereogum
Wednesday, 2/14: Because I Didn't Want to Go to Grad School..., Coachella2007, Jane, Kevin Barnett, Marooned, Music Snobbery, A Real Revival,
Thursday, 2/15: Chris Genoa, David Byrne, Hidden Track, Magomra, Metro Distortion, More Cowbell, MyBigMouthStrikesAgain,
Saturday, 2/17: Badminton Stamps, Chad Cheverier, Drewfonts, More Cowbell (again), My Big Mouth Strikes Again (again), We Don't Smell, Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, Ryan Not Charles, Stereogum (again), The Syndicate, WaterCoolerGossip
Stream Saturday night’s concert at NPR, or download it at Counting Stars on the Ceiling.
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By the way, you can almost seamlessly slip The Thermals’ “Test Pattern” after “Windowsill.” Try it! Collect them all!
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(*) It says all that on the Internet. So you know it’s true.
(**) Springsteen’s influence isn’t absent on Funeral – you can hear it at the end of the “Une année sans lumière,” a song that says, “Your old man should know: If you see a shadow, there’s something there.”
(***) There is this one fantastic doomed ballad-thing that manages a slight up-tick at the end. “Ocean of Noise” is the sort of song you’d love to hear Roy Orbison croon, something that might be about a relationship that’s falling apart. Even though the lyrics lean heavy on Fate (“Now who here among us still believes in choice? Not I!”), the end does get spangley, and Calexico’s horns come in while the narrator affirms “I’m gonna work it out, ‘cause time won’t work it out.” So, there’s that. But just two songs earlier there’s the assertion that “Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home.” Hooray!
(****) Charge $29 for an 80-minute set consisting almost entirely of new material, with no opening act, at your first area show in more than a year (and the last show was an expensive benefit)... then complain that your customers audience is “grumpy?” Ted Leo’s “warm-up show” is ten bucks. But then Leo’s a seasoned punk who doesn’t seem to consider his band a business... We’ll see what these guys charge for their upcoming Hammerstein/Palace Theatre/Cake Shop gigs.
YES? YOU THERE IN THE BACK? (2)
1. Kelly left...
02/18/2007 3:15 pm
great post on a great band. however, the album title didn't come from the
toole book, it's just a coincidence.
2. J____ left...
02/18/2007 5:33 pm :: http://heartonastick.blog-city.com/
Really? What an odd coincidence. The logo even looks a bit like the cover
of... okay, well it looks like a neon bible. Thanks, changed.