Arcade Fire, Electrelane @ Brixton Academy, Brixton, London
St. Paddys Day 2007
It’s St. Paddys, Rachel has come down from t’up north to enjoy the fun in London town. So what is there to do on Paddys Day in london you ask? hmm… certainly not drink thats for sure, pretty much every pub in the west end was bursting out into the streets in huge green waves of drunkeness. So after meeting with Mr Flowers we relocated to the ‘less busy’ Clapham high street and SW4 to watch England rugby team take a kicking from the Welsh and a few festive sorrow drowning Guinness’s.
Onward to Brixton and we had timed it almost ideally to miss most of the quite monotonous, ‘atmospheric’ noises of opening act electrelane. Nothing of note here, a few random mumblings were the only vocals to speak of and the concept of ‘melody’ was alien to them. Not really for me, but would draw a nice crowd at an art college!
Suddenly a sea of humanity swept over the stage as the small army of the Arcade Fire set about entertaining the enthusiastic capacity crowd. They launched immediatly into their latest single “Keep the Car Running” and after 30 seconds of their amazing sound, they had already proven how fantastic their live perfoamances are. Amazingly each of the 10 members all switched instruments after each track, goes to show thier talent as musicians. Most impressive was a cutesy female backing vocalist whio moved from vocals to accordian to organ to drums to keyboard, not bad I suppose. With all this chopping and changing, for some reason I was always counting the members, just incase another few have sneaked on. The orchestrations were superb and songs from their latest album ‘Neon Bible’ stood up well against their original work.
With the new album only been released for a week or so, everyone there tonight was waiting for the highlight reel of Funeral. Not to disappoint we were treated to them all, Laika, Tunnels, Wake Up sparked a thunderous ahhhhh-a-long, and Rebellion Lies had the venue shuddering under the force of the bouncing crowd. This wasnt a huge singaalong gig, more of a hum-a-long, but nonetheless just as enjoyable. Not having the crunch of a Marshall backed Gibson Les Paul didnt seem to matter this evening as this canadian troop pushed the boundarys of orchestral indie music to new levels. The show was afar from my usual live music tastes, but this is no ordinary band and it was goooooooood!
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