Six years after the release of their celebrated album, Funeral, Montreal-based band Arcade Fire seem to be everywhere – in headlines, headlining big summer music festivals, on top of charts, on top of the world.

For one thing, the band just released their third full-length album, The Suburbs, to widespread acclaim and chart-topping glory. Front-man Win Butler received a photo of an old friend standing in front of a suburban Houston mall, his young daughter perched atop his shoulders. The image inspired Win to recall his childhood in those same suburbs of Houston, and that became the album’s central theme. “We started working on that song [“The Suburbs”] and I feel like one step kind of started to sound like music; it started to feel like we were making an album,” Win explained in a July 2010 interview for Telegraph TV. “I’ve been living in Montreal for almost ten years now, and it just kind of felt like I needed to reconnect with that feeling a little bit of Houston before it was gone and try to kind of get it down before it was too far away to be able to conjure”.

And then to kick-off their 2010 tour, the band called on the help of film-director Terry Gilliam. Gilliam, who Win calls his “total hero”, helped direct the band’s streamed-concert at Madison Square Garden. After stops at Osheaga in Montreal’s Parc Jean-Drapeau on Île Sainte-Hélène and Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grand Park, The Suburbs debuted at #1 in the UK, the U.S. Billboard and in Canada. A few days later and after all they have achieved in the first weeks of August, Arcade Fire played a concert at Toronto’s Olympic Island – a city they feel very gracious for. “The first really exciting show we ever played where people lined up to see us was in Toronto,” Win said to the crowd of 17,000. “We love it here and thank you for supporting us all these years.”

The earliest to arrive by ferry settle against the railings by the front of the stage, while others spread blankets and sit comfortably in the sun waiting for the opening bands. Behind the stage, Win plays ping-pong with his brother, Will. He eats an early dinner and watches the opening bands – The Sadies and Janelle Monáe. From time to time, Win Butler walks with members of the other bands playing the role of a gracious host.

Many fill their bottles with water ahead of time while late arrivals fill remaining pockets of space amongst the crowd. A young, messy kid, in fondness, holds and plays with his father’s hands. Later, his father helps him put on a sea-green Arcade Fire shirt he bought at the merchandise table. A guy brings his girlfriend grilled corn on a cob that she reluctantly accepts. Followers of the opening bands disperse. Deciding to make a final restroom run, a couple lose their place at the front. The crowd cheers on a stage crew member who checks the microphones. He stands on the tips of his toes, struggling as he stretches to speak up to the microphone reserved for Win, the Friendly Giant. Faces of the young and old blend together; a mass of half-opened eyes wait for it.

Arcade Fire runs onstage as the large screen turns on, lights blinking. Régine Chassagne wears a glittery gold dress and takes hold of a set of drums. She wears colourful ribbons around her wrists and waist. Arms reach out from the crowd. Cameras and cell phones rise. Violinist Sarah Neufeld stands at the piano beside drummer Jeremy Gara and Will Butler on keyboard, while Win, Richard Reed Parry and Tim Kingsbury line up with guitars alongside violinist Marika Shaw.

Régine and Jeremy strike their drums simultaneously while lights blink around the stage, flashing like an old scratchy film countdown. Arcade Fire opens with one of their new songs, “Ready To Start”. Win commands the crowd to clap their hands. Each time the lights blink, the background flashes a large image of a highway. Fans echo Win’s words, “I would”. The video screen shows a sun setting until the song reaches its climax, unveiling images of fast-moving clouds rising like smoke and colours – turquoise, yellow and blue – all flowing out.

Before singing something more familiar, the band play another one of their harder songs from The Suburbs called “Month of May”. One of the many memorable moments of the show happen as Win folds his arms across his chest and snarls at still, stoic concertgoers everywhere, “I know it’s heavy, I know it ain’t light, but how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight?”

The next three songs, “Neighbourhood #2 (Laika)”, “No Cars Go” and “Haiti” roused the crowd into the half-dream/half-reality realm of Funeral and Neon Bible. New songs like “Modern Man” and “Rococo” sound even better than their recorded versions. “Rococo” sounded right for that moment because it was the half-way point of the show, the song building up from a quiet to loud dream-like humming.

“Crown of Love” comes on preparing the audience for the show’s climax. When Win sings the opening line, “They say it fades if you let it”, the crowd seems to collectively sigh as he returns us all to the elegiac tone of Funeral and the idea of being thankful for the things that are not forgotten. The band follows “Crown of Love” with an ascent that fuses together the image of what Win sees as a world that is filled with darkness and light. The band plays “Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)” – a song about abandonment and freedom – and the crowd dances in the dark, experiencing the possibilities of the freedom within the song to become real. When Régine sings her dance song “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” and shouts, “I need the darkness someone please cut the lights”, everyone becomes alone and together in the dark. The crowd shouts, they dance, and they feel selfish and happy.

Watching Arcade Fire live seems like a spiritual experience. The show becomes a meta-theatrical journey that wants to pull its audience in. When the band plays “Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)” all the lights come on and there is so much energy between the band and the crowd. The crowd shouts out, “We found the light!” Arcade Fire lulls you into the threshold of sleep and waking and with all the screaming, shouting and jumping the audience becomes lost and bewildered. Win shouts, “Is it a dream? Is it a lie? I think I’ll let you decide”. And as each moment passes and another song ends, the audience is left to wonder whether they were awake or dreaming.

After playing their last song – “Rebellion (Lies)” – the crowd hummed its ending with voices full of bliss and expectation. The audience sounded like a steaming kettle in that dark field away from the city, like little children calling out again and again to have their bedtime story read. They sing “Wake Up”, appropriately, as the encore finale. Arms reach out from the crowd, hands open as they hold their “mistakes up”. When the song ends, in complete wonderment, the crowd’s half-opened eyes’ wake in the threshold of wanting to sleep and wake up all night, over and over again.

Beach House – the Baltimore duo of vocalist/keyboardist Victoria Legrand and guitarist Alex Scully – are known for their dreamy and atmospheric sound. Legrand’s smoky voice along with the circuitous resonance of her vintage Yamaha keyboard intertwines with Scully’s freewheeling melody on guitar to create a unique and intense sound. But as Legrand explains in her interview for ARTISTdirect.com, she considers herself a “visual musician” as well, an artistic trait she inherits from her father who is both a painter and a composer. And there is a visual element to their music. Through echoes and the roundabout repetition of images in their lyrics, they create open, airy, imaginary spaces that seem near and, at the same time, distant.

Beach House recently made their new iTunes Sessions EP available for purchase on the iTunes store. The iTunes Sessions EP follows three full-length albums – Beach House (2006), Devotion (2008), Teen Dream (2010). In the EP, the band collaborates with Chris Coady, who also co-produced their well-received album Teen Dream. Out of the six reworked songs, four are from Teen Dream (“Walk in the Park”, “Norway”, “Silver Soul”, “Real Love”), one is from Devotion (“Gila”), along with a new song called “White Moon”.

The album alone is worth purchasing for the new track, while the remixes of old songs are a great addition to an already-colourful and vivid Beach House collection. The remixes are painted with lighter strokes compared to the originals. Legrand and Scully, as visual musicians, fulfill their songs’ potential to be composed through layers of perspective. In “Walk in the Park”, “Silver Soul”, “Gila”, and “Real Love”, Coady remixes the songs with less instrumentation, displaying the rawness and fragility of Legrand’s voice, which sounds more clear and intimate. In “Norway”, Legrand flattens and stretches her voice in a way that gives the song a new and eerie feel.

The album costs less than five dollars, which allows new listeners to be brave and take a chance on an unfamiliar sound. Existing fans can find a beautiful little EP that prolongs the adventure of Teen Dream. The new song, “White Moon”, extends the nostalgia for adolescence. “When I was a teenager, I pretty much dreamt about having a boy fall in love with me, wanting that really bad”, Legrand told Florino. “Or just making out.” In “White Moon”, Legrand paints her fantasy through the lyric’s “troubled boy” and “lucky girl”. The lyrical characters evoke the works of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, of whom Scully is a big fan. Beach House depict youthful, irrational teenage love through imagery that shares the spirit of Miyazaki’s animated films. And there’s something satisfying in the song’s repetition of “white moonbeam on my/your back” and the idea of having so much light and energy.

Beach House – “White Moon” by subpop

After seeing Arcade Fire at Toronto Island last weekend – a dream come true – a. and I were inspired to create our own version of the album art for the three AF albums for a very special someone who we cannot name yet. Let’s hope that special someone enjoys and appreciates these little works of art. There was a lot of love and patience (especially between a. and myself) that went behind the making of them. I can get a little grumpy if something is not done according to my standards and I know that isn’t fair. I’m a Virgo, forgive me! They turned out really amazing. My two favorites are Ocean of Noise and Haiti.

You can view the full-sized versions of these on my flickr.

Fallen all over again for “Vertigo”. While the theme of voyeurism, of looking and longing for an illusion remains at the center, just how I remembered it …
-Wishasana

I’ve had Apostle of Hustle’s Kings and Queens stuck in my head for the last couple of days. I wanted to capture it somehow and present it visually. I chose Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo because I liked the way Wishasana talked about the film – of looking and longing for an illusion. It’s her words that I wanted to reproduce acoustically and I think the song, Kings and Queens captures the movement of the film really well. The song moves in circles and it blends well with the idea of repetition and the visual echoing of details.

Read Wishasana’s article here.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Apostle of Hustle – Kings and Queens

Oranges are good snack foods when you’re giving a presentation. There they were, chilled and sliced. Everything belongs somewhere. Not sure how long it takes for an orange to go bad.

I like how quiet Palmerston Street is in the morning. An old man carries a tightly-rolled up gray plastic bag in his pocket and buys two small bushels of blueberries. The woman at the register hands the phone and a pen to another lady, who takes down an order: A box of figs, seven red bell peppers…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The National – So Far Around The Bend

It’s thirty degrees outside. It’s humid. I wait inside Top Taste, a tiny and messy Jamaican bakery/catering place. My bike rests against its windows. The old guy who owns the place is at the back preparing a man’s order – two boxes of spicy beef patties. The man who waits for his order has a kind look to his face. His hair is silver and he wears a gold watch and rings. He asks me a few questions to pass the time and to divert our attention away from the heat. There are two vacant stools.

Another man enters the place and I let him order first because he’s in a hurry. The man with the two boxes of spicy beef patties merely smiles at my gesture and orders a spicy ginger beer to go.

D’ya have chicken? Patties? No, jerk chicken. Uh-huh. Ok, gimme some jerk with rice. The old guy walks through the swinging door.

Before he leaves, the man packs his boxes of spicy beef patties and reminisces how old the place is. More than that, the other man says. I been here twenty three years, still here. Might even be thirty years then, the man responds. He takes a sip of his spicy ginger ale; there was no spicy ginger beer. The man tells us he used to live in Bartlett Street and asks whether we know where that is. I tell him I currently live right on the corner of Bartlett and Shanly. Everyone waits. The two of them talk about where to get the best roti and the best patties in the city. Before long, the man disappears and the old guy comes through the swinging door.

I ask the guy what he thinks of the Caribbean place across the street. S’arrite. They have good fried fish, but not enough rice dishes. I like rice dishes, y’know? He tells the story of the old guy now and how his son was killed in Scarborough. I can see the shiny head of the old guy at the back as he wraps the man’s jerk chicken and rice. He’s hard of hearing. D’you know him? He was short, got dreads? No, but I’ve seen another guy here, I tell him. Yeah, he got dreads too. That’s his older brother. A lot of stupid shit, you know? I nod and wait for the old guy to walk through the swinging door. The refrigerator is nearly empty. There’s two cakes and cocoa bread on the counter.

The man pats me on the shoulder and leaves. The old guy asks, Were you here earlier today? No. Oh, ok. The old guy laughs. He holds the cash register with both hands and he stares outside the store windows. What can I get for you? Can I get a box of chicken patties. Hot or cold? Do you have frozen?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Radio Dept. – Domestic Scene

There’s a little busy corner on Mirvish Village and while a. struggles to find words, we commit to a browse at once held dear treasures. Many fill patios for casual conversations on a stolen day. Two young girls drift aimlessly around their stock of vintage, overpriced dresses. Others choose to stop and take a tiny space on a curb or staircase and silently watch passersby like us.

On another corner, a woman performs her lines to a random onlooker. What the fuck are you looking at? Nothing. What the fuck are you looking at? It’s like a theatrical mirror, at least, for those who stopped to watch.

Books, books, magazines and more books. I point, coincidentally, at a book with the author she was looking for. A Pale View of Hills with its greyish-blue cover, but the one she wants isn’t there. The Annex is a secret breeding ground for readers and collectors. There are many hidden bookstores with each, big or small, having a distinct sewage or moldy smell. Frequent visitors are so used to it that they manage to ignore it. At Seekers, I sit on a step stool and skim at random books.

On one side of Brunny’s, sellers arrange rows of books that are looked and picked at from morning until night. Sometimes, there’ll be four or five left under the glow of the street light. Free, it’ll say on a piece of cardboard. Unfortunately, the leftover books would never make it as drunken college students, after a night of dancing and being free, spoil their pages.

——————

It doesn’t take long to get grumpy from thirst and hunger. We grab a large pulled pork burrito, which I held with dear life as we walked back to our place. Not far anymore. We’re almost there. Our kitts are alright. Luckily, a. always has a constant humor about things like this. I keep a tight hold of her hand after she corrects my confusing dusk for dawn.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Arcade Fire – We Used To Wait

We watched This Movie is Broken. I didn’t care much about the storyline. What was it about Carolyn Rush? I can see why she’d want to ditch Bruno, but why the dream concert of all time? And for a night of dancing at some place in Kensington? Really? And what about Bruno? If he really loved Carolyn Rush, why didn’t he go after her? Well, I guess he couldn’t do what Carolyn did – ditch the greatest BSS show of all time.

For a. and I, and for everyone else who was there on July 11, 2009, I’m sure it felt so good to relive moments from the Harbourfront show. I like how clear the songs sounded in the film. I like the Almost Crimes opening, the Sentimental Jam instrumental prior to the song becoming a full epic on the new record. I like Emily’s happiness being with her friends, the two shots of my a. and the one of both of us for a fraction of a second. I like the shot of Charles with his little girls, of Julie Penner shaking her shoulders and Marty setting up the stage. I like the shivers I got when Emily sings Anthems and the shot of Kevin, Leslie and Amy’s raised hands; their fingers touching. I like Kevin and Leslie’s duet and the love/adventure story it recalls in my own life. I like when Jason brings his sun and the whole band together. I liked how we were there for the dream show and that it was all free.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

BSS – Almost Crimes (Radio Aligre)

I couldn’t let June be wordless. You’re a good friend. You brought the World Cup. You say things like, don’t rush into things and we live longer. And to our kittens you say, you’re only going to get older, bigger and taller. Some comfort to Leo Messi, who’s goalless still, the first one comin’ for you (Germany). All the people that went to Olympic Island remember only the Harbourfront dream is real. Were you what you expected to be? A constant fan compelled to grow and change, to lose your past for un-tropical trees and a tattooed forearm. Take care.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Wilco – Sky Blue Sky

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is to our new friend, Shanly St., Toronto. It said, ‘Hey now, let’s go get dressed’. My mother and father came to drop off bagels, blueberry jam and whole wheat bread. There’s a quick measure of the window by the bathroom, thirty by thirty-two. My father stands on the back porch and smiles through the screen. And then I got dressed.

Rosie’s convenience at the corner, their menu reads: “Specials. Beef Stew. Soup.” I cross the street onto Dufferin St. and a Chinese man wearing a baseball cap sits on the steps, watches his son play outside their house. It’s lunchtime at the school nearby.

At Kensington, I grab cereal, white and red quinoa, dried parsley, fresh basil, a can of Amy’s Butternut Squash Soup and fresh mint to plant. I stop by the coffee shop to drink an Americano and call up a woman who wants to give up a nine-week old kitten for adoption. No answer. I listen to their conversation, while I finish my drink. It’s beautiful out.

The wind’s being an idiot. I buy a couple of last things – gift stuff. And then a last stop, a quick one to buy a tea catcher and measuring cups. It’s easy to get around. Pass by Rosie’s again and see their menu. Four unused doors, some with their glass broken, stand at the side of the store.