Arcade Fire warms up to radio
Arcade Fire hopes its new music can deliver huge radio hits, T’Cha Dunleavy writes.
ARCADE FIRE
When: Sept. 9, 7:30 p.m. Where: Canadian Tire Centre Tickets: $26-$85 at ticketmaster.ca, canadiantirecentre.com, or by phoning 1-877-788-3267
Richard Reed Parry almost gave it all up to become a goatherd.
Well, not quite, but following Arcade Fire’s European tour a few months ago, the Montreal-based multi-instrumentalist was past the point of exhaustion. He had brought his bike along, and someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“I knew I was going to do something fun and have an adventure at the end of the tour,” he said in a recent interview.
“A friend, who used to tour manage (Arcade Fire side project) Bell Orchestre in Switzerland and Germany, she’s now a goat herder in the Alps. She was like, ‘Come stay — it’s a cool place. You can stay in the farmhouse.’ ”
Parry spent four days “eating incredible goat cheese, drinking clean water, biking up the tall, green Alps.”
It was a sort of mental and physical cleanse after what he describes as the most gruelling tour in Arcade Fire history.
“It was loooong,” he said. “Two months is longer than we have generally done for the last 10 years. We have an agreement not to do tours that long, but somehow we got conned into it.”
The band is back on the road, stopping next Saturday, Sept. 9, at the Canadian Tire Centre.
The rigours of touring sync up with the band’s growing pains.
Arcade Fire’s fifth album, Everything Now, was released in late July on Columbia Records, a major label with major-league ambitions for one of the world’s biggest indie rock bands.
Worlds are colliding. With its crazy-catchy title track/debut single, released in early June, the band sent a clarion call that it was ready to play the industry game.
And the industry is playing along. The song received significant radio play, earning the band its first Billboard No. 1 on the Adult Alternative Songs chart.
“We’re in this funny position,” Parry said. “We have this big live following, bigger than plenty of artists with huge radio songs. I think we sort of thought (our last album) Reflektor would be on the radio, and it wasn’t. Part of that is because it sounds completely different than most stuff on the radio. But part of it is just that it really does change things, being on a bigger label. It’s a weird aspect of how music works — and not for the better, I think.”
Arcade Fire isn’t averse to radio play and topping charts, as long as the band can keep doing its thing. It’s a strange position to be in: a huge, internationally acclaimed rock band with a massive, feverishly devoted fan base, name-dropped by many of the biggest rock stars around, but still distinctly outside the mainstream. That said, they don’t mind testing the waters.
“I think we’re all interested in seeing if our slightly quirky music can end up as a popular radio song,” Parry said. “We were all curious to try to put our foot through that door. It’s exciting to see it working, taking off and being a thing people want to listen to.”
With a little help from their friends. The new album is coproduced by a couple of guys who know a thing or two about keeping your cool while putting on the hits: Thomas Bangalter of French dance/electro duo Daft Punk and Steve Mackey of ’90s Brit-pop act Pulp.
Both men share Arcade Fire’s musical voraciousness, Parry explained. Together, they helped guide Everything Now’s broad range of influences — from disco, funk and new wave to ska, classic rock, Afrobeat and electro — while fusing it into a steady-grooving whole.
“There’s more of an attention to bounce and rhythmic feel and trying to go all-in in terms of eclecticism,” Parry said, “without it seeming like a pawnshop. We were trying to use sonic cohesion to unify (the diverse sounds), maybe in a more focused way than ever before.”
Linking things thematically is an overarching critique of the hyperconnected state of the world and the commodification of, well, everything, including music.
“We started riffing on the idea of song as product,” Parry said, “or as content to fill this man-made space of the internet. We dialed it way back, but we went down this pretty funny rabbit hole.”
The tongue-in-cheek promotional campaign includes everything from an information-overloaded Everything Now website and pushy corporate Twitter feed to a series of “fake news” — stories about the band, including a satirical “Stereoyum” review trashing the new album before hearing it and a made-up controversy about dress codes.
It all comes together to make Everything Now Arcade Fire’s most contemporary album, from the music on down, looking at the present moment in all its confusion.