Once, when asked to describe his view of the world in eleven words or less, Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler responded simply that “Death Is Real.” The question at the heart of Funeral’s colossal penultimate track (and also, I would argue, at the heart of everything Arcade Fire has ever written) is a familiar one: … Read more
“Crown Of Love” hooked me from the very start, with a driving, edgy chord progression that continues essentially unchanged verse-to-verse except for the voices that are continually added to it throughout the song: first, drums and an out-of-tune piano provide a skeletal promise behind Win Butler’s ghostly narration. They’re soon joined by a sparse string … Read more
I’m only a few weeks into senior year, yet something about the phrase “getting ready for graduation” is already beginning to rub me the wrong way. After all, as experience shows, the true rites of passage, the ones with the power to transform, inevitably catch us unprepared, unwilling, or both. Even when we choose … Read more
On September 14th, 2004, when Arcade Fire’s Funeral was released, most of this magazine’s writers had barely entered middle school. We each had our unique experiences of discovering the album—some first heard the songs over the speakers of their older siblings’ CD players, others at high school parties, and some only in college at the rabid … Read more
“7 Kettles” is like my lullaby. It transports me from any state of depression or stress to one of calm. I can literally feel myself being carried up and away by the strings that comprise the song’s opening. The soothing guitar riff that permeates the whole song is not grounding so much as it is … Read more
I remember first hearing “Wake Up” sometime in the middle of my freshman year of high school. Those forceful opening chords and near-euphoric shouts forming a soundtrack to a confusing mess of a year: wandering between classes and buildings, slipping through crowded hallways, dodging the unzipped mouths of backpacks spilling class handouts into the walkway. … Read more
Somewhere along the way, frontman Win Butler and the rest of Arcade Fire must have read Don DeLillo’s White Noise. I read the novel in my tenth-grade English class—it’s a grim, wryly comedic cultural critique that centers on a small-town Hitler studies professor and his family. Everyone struggles to cope with the specter of his … Read more
I am immediately uneasy when “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” starts. It’s not simply the aimless lyrics, nor the drastic change in tone from “Une Année Sans Lumière”, but the frantic desperate energy of the song that impresses upon me the depth of the collapse that has occurred. Not knowing what has actually happened only exacerbates … Read more
I continue to return to “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)” not because of the brilliant technical complexity, but due to the transformative power of the accordion. In step with the marching beat and swelling strings, the optimistic bellows give the song a country-folk flavor. Listening to that whimsical accordion chord progression transports me to a small, European … Read more
In the age of online dating and Tinder, modern affection has become increasingly rationalized. No longer constrained by the numbers in our phonebook, we have access to more possible dates in a day than preceding generations could have in a lifetime. The idea that you could meet anyone, anywhere, is an invitation for the rationalist … Read more