The sound of gratitude chuffing up

I wish there was some way for me to personally thank the Arcade Fire for remaining awesome in a universe governed by entropy and in a society so tolerant of shitty pop music. The Suburbs is so sweet and pretty whilst avoiding treacle, and as an exploration of middle-class vide it has no parallel I can think of. And as an exploration of a deeply annoying thing, it's not annoying, which is a trick you rarely see in any art form, and to see it in pop music. . . well, fuck me. That is beautiful.

And it looks like Régine Chassagne remembered how to sing, too. For me her voice had always been the worst thing about the band but now I'm into it. On "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" she sounds like a gloriously cranked up Deborah Harry, or the song sounds like a cranked-up version of "Heart of Glass", that actually fucking means something - if crank makes things way better. From memory, it does, but I may have been partial. Anyways, listen for yourself:

A statement of the obvious

The Arcade Fire is fucking ace. That's so obvious I feel a little silly typing it out. But I've forgotten about it for awhile as it's a bit too tinkly for the F-word so it doesn't get played at home, and for the past year or so my work has been so wordy that I don't think I've listened to music at the office for ages. But now that it's getting a little more spatial I can listen to music in a serious way at the same time, and it's been so nice to have Funeral and Neon Bible playing away.

Aside from the charm of the music, which I do find charming on its own merits, the Arcade Fire gives me pleasure by making me imagine a world where mainstream soul and R&B and fucking everything didn't suffer from a massive and indiscrimate uptake of electronic musical effects. Obviously I love electronic musical effects, but something went wrong somewhere. We're not in a situation where everybody is still touring with horn sections and that lots of big bands are soaking up all of those wandering lost uni music grads. Nope. Just Arcade Fire, and Final Fantasy, and a bunch of other Canadian and European weirdos who I never hear of until it's far too late - case in point:



Broke up ten fucking years ago . . .