Arcade Fire

By Hackney Citizen | Thursday 8 July 2010 at 10:34

Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler live at the Hackney Empire to promote new album The Suburbs. Photograph: Gaelle Beri/Retna

This article titled “Arcade Fire” was written by Alexis Petridis, for The Guardian on Thursday 8th July 2010 01.45 UTC

There’s something striking about the behaviour of Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler at the show to launch the band’s third album, The Suburbs. Between songs, he jokes with the crowd: “Well, I still think England have a pretty good shot at this World Cup”, he smirks to a chorus of boos.

He unexpectedly ends a song called We Used To Wait crowd-surfing, still clutching his microphone stand. He’s relaxed and confident, which makes for a marked contrast with how he looked at the final gigs in support of Neon Bible, the album that catapulted the Montreal band to the cusp of international, stadium-packing success. The bigger the album and the accompanying shows got, the more Butler looked like a man who’d discovered his appeal against a parking ticket had been turned down.

Then again, on the evidence of the songs the band play from The Suburbs tonight, Butler has every reason to be relaxed and confident: they sound amazing, a genuine progression from Neon Bible. Released to good reviews, that album began attracting a kind of retrospective criticism, principally that it lacked the charm of their debut album Funeral. That applied the band’s apocalyptic sturm and drang approach to songs about childhood memories, amping youthful vignettes into the stuff of epic legend. Neon Bible, on the other hand, just offered a bunch of apocalyptic-sounding songs about the imminent apocalypse, and the world is hardly lacking in stadium rock bands making a big old bombastic racket about the environment and war and reality TV.

There’s no denying the power of their old material: Intervention provokes an earnest singalong, while you’d have to be catatonic not to be moved as Neighbourhood (Power Out) segues into Rebellion (Lies). Equally, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that the songs from The Suburbs achieve the same cumulative mass-euphoria effect, via a weirder, more nuanced, less obviously bombastic route: one track is fittingly titled Rococo, but Butler performs it with such blunt ferocity that virtually every string on his acoustic guitar is broken.

Decorated with layers of feedback, Empty Room sounds thrillingly chaotic, but, as the closing Month Of May thunders along, it seems in constant danger of slipping its mooring entirely and descending into noise.

But it doesn’t. The band encore with the hits: Neighbourhood (Tunnels), Keep The Car Running, Wake Up. The audience understandably go bananas, as does Florence Welch, who dances up in the balcony with the cheering abandon of a committed fan. Understandably, Butler and the rest of the Arcade Fire leave the stage wreathed in smiles.

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