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Firing blanks: Why the Arcade Fire sound shouldn’t be imitated

Written by Dan Steadman
Monday, 01 June 2009 00:00

The year was 2005. The month, February. Hell, while I’m negotiating memory lane, I may as well locate the correct house. (If memory is a lane, would specific days be houses, or just…sub-lanes? Never mind.) The exact day was Friday 25 February, 2005. The location: Selectadisc, Nottingham. The event: buying Arcade Fire’s Funeral.

Through the combined wisdom of muso website Pitchforkmedia and funky spaceman David Bowie, I was led – like so many others – to a well-informed record store to buy a debut album by a band I’d never heard.

Undeterred by Bowie’s recent “I’m-down-with-the-kids” moment on “Jools Holland” (sharing the show with Liverpool’s The Coral, he observed, “I really love The Corals”), I raced home, took off my (figurative) anorak, and pored over the details of my purchase. The delicate – almost flimsy – gatefold cover, tattooed with elaborate, whimsical illustrations. A crisp, dainty inlay, adorned with a sullen image of the band and (excitingly) the day’s date. If the music was even half as good as the packaging, then Artful Dodger and Armatrading, Joan would have to make way; there was going to be a new king of my record collection’s “AR” shelf.

My eager ears weren’t disappointed. The keen moaning of Win Butler and the piercing war cries of his wife Regine Chassagne. The dramatic, massed vocals, roaring sombre words of truth. Thunderous, clattering melees of guitar, violin and drum. Soon my housemates had heard it, favourite tracks were picked and, before we knew it, there they were in front of us: at Birmingham’s Academy II, unofficially accompanied by the enormous amateur baritone standing next to us, boldly bellowing every word of Tunnels #1 in a thick Brummie accent.

Surveying the current music scene four years later, it seems I was not alone. In 2009, Brighton’s The Maccabees, London’s Red Light Company and New Brunswick’s The Gaslight Anthem have all had Radio 1-playlisted, chart-bothering singles that bear the unmistakeable mark of Win Butler & co. Rhythm is crucial to both the appeal and radio-friendliness of these tracks; ponderous, yearning verses, interrupted by pulsating, escalating choruses. A sense of size is also key, of a sound that can generate the same live frenzy as the often 10-strong Arcade Fire do on stage. These bands do not constitute a “scene” as such, but their choice of this uplifting, earnest style of music (and performance) display more than a simple debt. Though their songs are not always derivative (The Maccabees, in particular, have shaped their influences incredibly interestingly), there is a sense of unacknowledged (and unwanted) homage. This distorted legacy is a familiar rock music scenario: would Kurt Cobain have wanted his tortured thrash to have influenced the morose Stain’d? Could Rage Against the Machine envisage their political fury becoming a touchstone for the vapid “rap-rock” of Limp Bizkit? Did Jack & Meg White burn their red stage outfits in horror, as their eccentric garage-rock spawned an outbreak of “The” bands?

While influence can be nothing but a compliment to any musician, the idea of their sound becoming a cut-and-paste formula that guarantees radio play should be abhorrent. (The Fall’s Mark E. Smith – that eternal champion of offensively common sense – responded to Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party’s citing of him as an influence by saying that “there’s no belief in what they’re doing…it’s like they just want a career in music.”) It’s particular cause for concern with Arcade Fire as their songs so often flirt with bombast. Once that ambition to make an epic, cathedral-sized sound is no longer invested with any charm or imagination, the result is more odious than regular “bad” music because of the inevitable time, talent and expense wasted on it. Guns N’ Roses’ ghastly Chinese Democracy record is the ultimate warning of this fate. Axl Rose tried to fuse 20 years worth of evolving influences and came up with a confused, shapeless disaster.

The chances of Arcade Fire becoming so bogged down in their own myth seem unlikely though. Quite apart from having released a hugely likeable second album (Neon Bible), they have at their helm an intelligent, erudite frontman, who’s keen to avoid the pitfalls of hype (he described the follow-up to Funeral as “something that will eventually just be one of our many albums, the one between our first and third”) and rockstar squabbles (witness his dignified response to a seemingly unprovoked tongue-lashing from The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne).

The criticism most often thrown at the band is their po-facedness, a vague sense that a group of individuals who are “just a band” should have no reason to take their exploits so seriously. Rock critic Paul Morley described Butler’s stage presence as “wag[ing] a war on apathy”. These are no uncertain terms and it is difficult not to get swept along in the hyperbole; it’s also easy to see why so many emerging bands are so keen to mimic them. However, both the slavering bands and excitable journos (i.e. me) would do well to remember that what we’re all awaiting is only a third album. For a band to have (arguably) inspired a new sound with only two full-length releases is a colossal burden. The trips to record stores, loud audience members and obsessive Funeral-listening may have now formed part of many muso’s teen and student years, but the album is not definitive…hopefully that Arcade Fire record stills awaits us.