If they ever decide to return to the British burg after last night’s show, that is. Apparently an audience member at last night’s Nottingham Arena show decided to get up close and personal with frontman Win Butler, throwing a projectile at him during the performance of “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out).”
While cleaning out his archives, Gawker’s Jim Lehnhoff unearthed some video that he shot of the Arcade Fire all the way back on April 11, 2004, at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. (They were third on the bill, playing behind the Unicorns and freakin’ Chromeo, and in front of The Ponys.) More »
Of all the bands to come out of the scary blog hype monster, The Arcade Fire is really not so offensive. They are, though perhaps irritatingly quirky, a pretty damn decent band, and they certainly do put on an enthusiastic live show. But a recent article in The Guardian suggests that at least one member of the band still doesn’t have his perspective screwed on quite right.
After all that hype and hope that the Arcade Fire fans of the world would, one day, be able to turn Win Butler into a vampire, beonlineb.com opened its virtual doors on Saturday. The site wound up being a reminder to critics that Neon Bible came out this year Web-site-as-interactive-video, with a lot of actionscripting that allowed you to drown Win and play with a pair of disembodied hands and wonder if you weren’t missing something the first, second, and sixth times you clicked through the thing. (Hence the pranksters on Brooklyn Vegan who claimed that certain click patterns would result in winning tickets to a “secret show.” Maybe that was part of the “art”?)
Lost in all the In Rainbows hoopla earlier this week was the fact that the Arcade Fire–who, you may remember, put out the most important album of 2007 first–would be unleashing a huge surprise via the Web site BeonlineB this Saturday. Speculation over what the site, the name of which is derived from an anagram for Neon Bible, would be launching has run rampant over the past few days, with most of the guesses using the words “remix,” “b-sides,” “remixes,” or “James Murphy.” But what if the ever-innovative Canadians are going for something completely … different? Something with a little bit of le Web 2.0 flair?
Arcade Fire’s “Broken Window” is a vinyl-only B-side from the band’s recent Ne-Yo Bible sessions–which means that it was only a matter of days before someone digitized it and sent it to our inbox. Listeners should be patient, as it starts off real quiet-like before becoming all gloomy n’ doomy. More »
Today’s New York Times profiles Dr. Atul Gawande, a well-respected surgeon and author who brings his iPod to the operating room: On a recent day, when he took out a gallbladder, two thyroids and what was supposed to be a parathyroid gland but maybe wasn’t, the playlist included David Bowie, Arcade… More »
New York City’s “creative”-centric offices experienced a plummet in productivity at around 10 a.m., when Arcade Fire tickets for a few shows in May went on sale–and people once again turned to Craigslist to either avenge their slow mouse-trigger fingers or make a quick buck. More »
– Courtney Love and Bruce Willis were spotted making out last week at an Amy Winehouse concert, where the two also discussed the possibility of having Billy Corgan ghost-write Bruno Returns…Again. More »
It’s a registration-required article, alas, but today’s Wall Street Journal looks at the boom in rustic or makeshift music studios:
In the last two weeks, about half of the new albums with featured reviews on Pitchfork, an independent-music Web site, were recorded either in makeshift studios or professional ones in pastoral settings. Arcade Fire bought an old church outside Montreal to record last week’s “Neon Bible,” which has since sold 92,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Brit-rock band the Kaiser Chiefs recorded their second album, “Yours Truly, Angry Mob,” which comes out March 27, at a country manor in Berkshire, England. (Rustic is relative: The manor includes a professional studio and advertises its gym and heated pool.)
