October 18, 2004
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
A Draining Week in the Indie-Music Spotlight
By KELEFA SANNEH
The New York Times
All right," said Win Butler, sizing up the crowd late last Wednesday night at the Mercury Lounge. "We're the flavor of the month. Let's go."
And they went. A single guitar chord oozed through the speakers, and four of Mr. Butler's band mates joined him at the front of the stage, singing a wordless, full-throated overture while the drummer behind them kept time. Then the crashing subsided and Mr. Butler started to sing, his voice wild and shaky with half-swallowed terror. "Somethin' filled up my heart with nothin', someone told me not to cry," he began, with a violin line swelling and deflating behind him. And a crowd full of ecstatic fans and converts braced itself for the next crash.
Hundreds and hundreds of indie-rock bands descended on New York City last week for the CMJ Music Marathon, an alt-rock expo that annexes Manhattan's nightclubs once a year. But none of them generated more excitement than this one: a brilliant, slanted Montreal-based septet called the Arcade Fire.
The debut Arcade Fire album, "Funeral," was released barely a month ago, on Sept. 14, by the indie label Merge, based in North Carolina. Enthusiastic reviews were written, even more enthusiastic blog entries were posted, MP3's circulated. It used to take months of touring and record-shop hype for an underground band to build a cult, but now it takes only a few weeks. "I'd like to thank the Internet," Mr. Butler said, and he wasn't serious, but he also wasn't wrong.
So the band's Wednesday night concert was one of the week's most exclusive shows: tickets sold out long in advance, and if you had showed up at the club bearing a $545 CMJ badge, you would have been (politely) directed to wait in line.
Even so, the seven members of the Arcade Fire managed to exceed all expectations - the group's live show is much rowdier and more unhinged than the album. During "Neighborhoods #2 (Laïka)," Mr. Butler's younger brother, Will, joined forces with the band's mad scientist, Richard Reed Parry, and they picked up drumsticks to beat on whatever was closest: ceiling pipes, amplifiers, glockenspiels, each other. Régine Chassagne, the band's riveting co-lead singer, squeezed out an accordion line alongside Sarah Neufeld's violin. And Win Butler yelped a frantic, fractured story: "Our older brother, bit by a vampire! For a year we caught his tears in a cup! And now we're gonna make him drink it! Come on, Alex, don't die or dry up!"
Before the concert ended there was a nimble but fearsome ode to Haiti (where Ms. Chassagne's parents come from); a sad but true tale about a keyboard ("Our piano fell out of the back of our U-Haul today," Mr. Parry explained); and a friendly physical confrontation: the night was over when Mr. Butler cheerfully wrestled Mr. Parry to the ground.
Twelve hours later, on Thursday afternoon, the band members could be found in the East Village, on the corner of 10th Street and First Avenue. Their destination was the Russian and Turkish Baths, a few feet away, but before they could get there they were stopped twice by East Villagers who wanted to congratulate them for the previous night's show. They smiled and kept moving, and soon all seven were ensconced inside the one of the hottest rooms on the East Coast, letting sweat seep through their rented shorts.
At its worst, the CMJ Music Marathon is an exhausting thicket of half-empty showcases and bogus promotional ventures. So it helps to be the Arcade Fire. That is, it helps to be "the flavor of the month," the band everyone's talking about, the band that gets summoned to dinner (as happened on Friday night) by Seymour Stein, the founder of Sire Records. It also helps to be the kind of band that's determined to turn a week of music-biz overload into yet another weird adventure. When Ms. Chassagne, Ms. Neufeld and Mr. Parry discovered that one of the smaller saunas was also an effective reverb chamber, they unnerved an unsuspecting fellow bather by trying out a three-part chorale, which became a five-part chorale when the Butler brothers showed up.
The different parts of the Arcade Fire were assembled slowly and sometimes painfully over the past few years. Win Butler, who was raised in Texas, came to Montreal as a student, and he met Mr. Parry when he put up a flier that said, more or less, "I have this house where you can make a lot of noise and nobody cares." Ms. Neufeld emerged from Montreal's fertile electronica scene to become the band's one-woman string section. And Ms. Chassagne, an autodidactical polyinstrumentalist (her early piano education included time spent studying a composer named Nintendo, famous for his classic, "Super Mario Bros."), was suspicious of Mr. Butler at first: she remembers thinking, "Oh, this is just another bimbo guy who wants to play me a song." But he must have grown on her, because last summer she married him.
An early incarnation of the band holed up in Maine to record a sketchy but enthralling mini album. You can hear a few songs from it at
www.newmusiccanada.com, where the band also lists four major influences: Debussy, Neil Young, the Pixies and Alvino Rey, the late steel guitar virtuoso who happens to be the Butlers' grandfather. By the time the group recorded "Funeral," members had come and gone (the band nearly broke up more than once), and the music had likewise expanded and splintered.
"Funeral" is a scruffy epic, with 10 interlocking songs united by overlapping themes and sounds: the sharp thwack of Howard Bilerman's drum kit (he has since been replaced by Jeremy Gara), the slow-motion bass lines by Tim Kingsbury, the elegiac melodies that seep out in sobs and spasms, the intensifying instrumental passages that gather momentum slowly but ruthlessly.
Throughout, Mr. Butler and Ms. Chassagne sing about proud characters humbled by storms and fire and violence. Mr. Butler says his obsession with thunder and lightning is really an obsession with helplessness: "Like, oh, there's an ice storm in Montreal, and there's no power for a week. I think people interact differently in those situations they have no control over - it could be weather, it could be war." You get the same feeling from Ms. Chassagne's wild-eyed warble, whether she's evoking the madness of Haiti's Tonton Macoutes or repeating a puzzling, intoxicating elegy: "Alice died in the night/I've been learning to drive my whole life."
The band members' visit to the Russian and Turkish baths may have been the last time they relaxed all week. Later that night they headed to Midtown to play a brief set at the Museum of Television and Radio, to be broadcast on the Seattle alt-rock station KEXP. (Will Butler was gently reprimanded for using an invaluable old radio poster as a rhythm instrument.) The next day, Friday, they suffered through three photo shoots in a single afternoon, and by Saturday afternoon they were installed at Arlene Grocery, the Lower East Side club, for their third CMJ performance in four days.
It was a chaotic show, thanks largely to a pair of obstreperous (and seemingly untune-able) guitars; Mr. Parry declared it the worst Arcade Fire show ever, although Ms. Neufeld disagreed. Needless to say, the crowd loved it anyway (except for those poor people stuck outside on Stanton Street). And as the band began a cracked but still-lovely rendition of "Une année sans lumière," with guitars glimmering to match the bilingual lyrics, Mr. Butler said goodbye to this year's CMJ Marathon. "We've never done one of these doodads before," he announced. "It's been" - a pause, the faint outline of a smile - "fine."
