THE BEST BAND YOU MAYBE DON’T KNOW
Arcade Fire sizzles with new release ‘Everything Now’
Arcade Fire is a strange band. Yes, its music is abnormal — arty, intellectual and deeply passionate, in stark contrast to synthetic modern Top 40. But what's most odd about the band is the unique place it occupies in the industry. In a world where only pop, country and baby boomer acts play arenas, Arcade Fire regularly plays to crowds of 10,000. Tonight, it headlines the TD Garden. “The Foo Fighters are great, but they're a generation older than us; War On Drugs are great, but they're a generation younger than us,” multi-instrumentalist Will Butler said. “Looking around at other bands, it's a pretty small group that we are apart of.”
Like the band's last two albums, its new record, “Everything Now,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. It's a feat today's biggest rock bands — the Killers, Kings of Leon, Vampire Weekend — have not been able to equal. And yet, the mainstream is barely aware of Arcade Fire. Even after beating out the likes of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry to win the 2011 Album of the Year Grammy, the band doesn't have the name recognition of many one-hit wonders or “American Idol” contenders.
“We're in a funny position,” Butler said. “We're big and we're popular, but (the recent single) `Everything Now' is our first song to really do anything on the charts. We're big and still not well known.”
If you're a fan of Pink Floyd's “Dark Side of the Moon” or U2's “Achtung Baby,” “Everything Now” might seem like a typical rock record. But no LP of the last few years has been as weird and popular as Arcade Fire's latest.
The band begins the record with a 30-second dub version of the title track before abandoning the song. It just collapses into a rush of ambient noise. Then a second take of the title track kicks in with a mix of New Order's electronica and James' indie pop, and Win Butler, Will's older brother, sings, “Every song that I've ever heard is playing at the same time, it's absurd.” The lyric makes a good slogan for an album obsessed with modern consumerism and fueled by the sonic touchstones of disco, punk, reggae, Americana, experimental rock and new wave.
“A lot of the songs on this record came out of pure musical exploration,” Will Butler said. “We were doing it in this tiny studio in New Orleans that we built in Win and Regine's (Chassagne) backyard, so it was a really small physical space with the feedback from your instrument and every other instrument right in your face.”
Butler appreciates the success of the new album, but it's hard for him to have perspective on his own work and see the development of the band.
“I recently listened to (the 2004 song) `Crown of Love,' and it's like a straight '50s song that doesn't mesh with a disco outro,” he said. “That first album has hard rock riffs and all these absurd transitions. So to me, when people say the new album is eclectic, well, it's an apt description, but I think that's an accurate description of all our work.”