MORE LIKE ARCADE DIRE, BITCHPORK?

So it's Sound of Silver Day, with the new LCD Soundsystem album garnering a spot-on review at Pitchfork from Mark Pytlik and some great analysis by newish 'forker Eric Harvey over at Marathonpacks; SFJ has a short piece glossing it nicely in this week's New Yorker. I've barely begun to be able to verbalize my love for this record, though I'm further along with it than I am with another potential album of the year, Battles' forthcoming Mirrored ("Atlas" video). So I guess it's about time I become the last person ever to talk about that new LP from prior p4k album-of-the-year kids (The) Arcade Fire.

First, with all due respect to every other music critic on the planet:

WTF???

I've read a lot of reviews for Neon Bible, the follow-up to the widely successful (for an indie album) Funeral, plus a couple of high-paying magazine pieces much more gushing than the fine review by Dave Moore that, in effect, started it all-- and I have yet to see a single truly negative piece by a professional critic (Gawker doesn't count). The closest I can think of was Michelangelo Matos's piece, which focuses on Moore and the band's success but seems oddly noncommittal about the music. Meanwhile, former colleague/editor Nick Sylvester has staked out a clever contrarian position, saying he never liked the debut but proclaiming his love for Neon Bible because of, I dunno, I guess the fact it's "not afraid to be a little cliche from time to time." Gee, YOU THINK??? (Reminds me of the commenter on some now-defunct blog who asked, "And what does this Marc Hogan has [sic] against the cliches? Cliches represent almost 80% of our entire life and I think that his life as well, but the fact is that they give us the spice of life." Pretty sure that's from a Haitian proverb.) Anyway, does every single pop music critic actually have the exact same opinion of this album? No fun!

I'm really glad nobody asked me to rate Neon Bible, because I'm not sure what I'd say. The album obviously works for some ppl (plus many more online critics than I'd expected), and I can appreciate the mechanics of *how* and *why* it works, leading me to some kind of boring 7.x score on the p4k scale. At the same time, I absolutely, utterly despise this record and the entire outlook on music it represents. I once saw Radiohead piano coverdude Christopher O'Riley work his shtick in Madison, Ga., in front of a few slack-jawed college dopes from Athens and a bunch of good, open-minded folks my parents' age there for only the latest event in the local cultural center's classical music series. I'll never forget O'Riley introducing Radiohead as the "most important" band in the world today and proceeding to play all the wrong songs WAY TOO FAST to show off his misspent chops; Wikipedia sez dude's also called Elliott Smith "the most important songwriter since Cole Porter." Shins change your life yet, Christopher?

Neon Bible strikes me as an album more interested in its own significance than in making people feel, or think, or dance. Praising a work of art for its importance rather than for its (admittedly subjective) quality is a time-tested way of bullying people into accepting your opinion, even if they secretly don't give a shit about the music in question. O'Riley lacked the language and apparently the interpretive ability to render Radiohead in a way my parents would remember for more than an evening, so he pulled out the "most important" canard. (They probably still forgot.) Even Stephen M. Deusner's thorough Pitchfork review leaned on posterity (an implicit, and irrefutable, argument about "importance") in a more defensive moment: "It could strike some listeners as a disappointing follow-up, but the record's mix of newfound discipline and passion will likely imbue it with a long shelf-life." Only one step from here to the conservatory and plenty of other truly important music people listen to but rarely love, such as the dead-end atonal stuff even Terry Riley wrote off as "neurotic." OMG LIKE IMPORTANCE IS DEATH DUDES!

We can talk circles at each other about cliches v. archetypes and quote McLuhan without most ppl reading him (anybody else see the perplexing hot/cold media non sequitur in the last Wire?) all night, but there are different kinds of cliches, and as used in pop music lots of 'em suck. ("Thou shalt not make repetitive, generic music.") Neon Bible represents obsolescent rockist cliches about what constitutes Important Music; it'll be interesting to see how posterity really deals with it. The record has Lots of Instruments (so what if they're all often playing the same thing), it does Dramatic Stuff (like go from soft to LOUD), the lyrics are vaguely political (so what if most reviewers missed a point Matthew Perpetua made to me recently, about how the album's theme is that faith and commerce are now el mismo-- Neon Bible, get it?), the skillful marketing campaign soon copied by Kelz looks like an anti-marketing-campaign, and the lead singer is a privileged white male who dons Sling Blade haircuts and imitates daily-newspaper rockcrit white male gods Bruce Springsteen, U2, and David Byrne; so what if the arrangements/dynamics are predictable, the lyrics often atrocious ("Mirror, mirror on the wall / Show me where the bombs will fall", etc.)? Oh, and the thing was recorded in a 19th-century church (the Wall Street Journal seems to think this is a new trend [reg. req'd link; summary via Idolator], but it actually dates back to white male newspaper-crit heroes Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois and overrated anthem-mongering like The Joshua Tree). *And* there's a Hungarian military choir! (Super Furry Animals punk'd the media's love of this cliche by pretending they'd done something similar in Catalonia for Love Kraft but actually just overdubbing it back in Wales). Arcade Fire EVEN performed LIVE on typically lip-synced "Top of the Pops"! Did I mention there are Lots of Instruments?

All these elements of Neon Bible are just critic-pleasing cliches of thought-- representing a Bob Dylan-era worldview of what constitutes "importance" in music-- and the values they represent are all liable to change as the next generation of music writers turns to its own touchstones. Which may or may not include your unforgettable Fire. Even the infamous SNL guitar-smashing smacked of inherited rebelliousness that no longer means anything; hence the "Haitian proverb" intellectualizations and the complete lack of drama in what Townshend and Hendrix made violent and sublime, respectively. To my eyes Win Butler didn't "just fucking go for it," as Nick asserts, and in fact started off pretty half-heartedly. Particularly during the end-of-show curtain call, Butler looked all too much like a desperate hipster, clapping just enough to seem polite but making certain to look uneasy doing it. Kinda like Al Gore (humblest apologies to my favorite blogger, Bob Somerby).

"Don't do the embarrassing thing of trying to be serious. That's what we do here; we get Radiohead, and they get all serious. It's either get real serious or you shrug. There's got to be something else out there. There's got to be."
- LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, on Chris Martin, in Status Ain't Hood

Worst of all, in my view, but particularly essential to "importance" arguments: Arcade Fire are NO GODDAMN FUN and they have NO SENSE OF HUMOR. The moment that opened up Funeral for me was the sprinkle of Northern Soul in the "look out for love" section of "Wake Up Un Anne Get Your Gun," or whatever. Nothing so playful comes anywhere near their sophomore effort. I'd never seen the blog Sausage Mahoney before, but this post lays out some intriguing points: "The record is self-important and humorless, and, more distressingly, it's self-righteous about its belief in its own importance and its total absence of humor." As Get Him Eat Him indie rocker ("2x2" stream) and fellow p4k typist Matt LeMay has said, "Sounding 'ambitious' is the least ambitious thing a band can do in 2007." Richard Meltzer tagged Springsteen as the Fonz, so who does that make Butler?

"If you look at the Web sites of a lot of the majors, they're selling everything — hip-hop, country, Disney soundtracks. It's the throw-a-lot-of-garbage-at-the-wall..."
-- Win Butler, New York Times magazine profile

Indeed. How DARE *anyone* listen to hip-hop, country, or manufactured kid-pop? There's an Arcade Fire in town! Yaaaawn.

Better Neon Bible: Josh Ritter's "Thin Blue Flame" (lyrics and mp3 via Doug Rice), which made my 2005 P&J ballot. Now, Stephen King-approved! I hope Ritter's next label can help him afford a producer as granular as Brian Deck, who produced last year's dazzling The Animal Years. MORE HURDY GURDY AMIRITE?



And now for something completely different: My friend Dave's first live-action film! (Also my first exposure to the new Norah Jones, which is actually pretty all right, though not as good as the new hipster Norah Jones):



Links: My 2004 UR Chicago profile of Arcade Fire)