ARCADE FIRE

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Arcade Fire deliver a deluxe edition of their Grammy-winning album The Suburbs

By Burg Staff on Aug. 18, 2011
BY MATT ASHARE

Arcade Fire, The Suburbs — Deluxe Edition (Scenes From the Suburbs), (Merge)

SUBURBIANA: Arcade Fire reissue their Grammy winner

It’s only been a year since Arcade Fire, then just an emerging indie-label band from Toronto, released the ambitious little album that could — a 16-track opus called The Suburbs. Thanks in part to some masterful marketing, which included two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden the week of the disc’s release, a campaign that encouraged fans to pre-order downloads of the disc at Amazon for a steep discount, and eight alternative cover-art schemes (collect them all or have fun trading with your friends), The Suburbs debuted at number one on the Billboard album charts and went on to earn gold certification by the end of 2010. Even more surprising, in February the disc famously became the first indie-label release to win the highly coveted Grammy for “Album of the Year,” much to the chagrin of Beiberheads around the globe.

         But Arcade Fire and their Durham, NC-based label Merge haven’t given up on The Suburbs just yet. Almost a year to the day of disc’s original release, there’s now a brand new, expanded, “deluxe” edition of the album, featuring, as the sticker on the cover boasts, a bonus DVD containing a 30-minute short by acclaimed film/video producer Spike Jonze titled “Scenes From the Suburbs,” the video for the disc’s title track, and a “behind the scenes” documentary about the making of the video, as well as a two new songs (“Culture War” and “Speaking in Tongues”) and an 80-page photo booklet.

Apparently, there wasn’t room on the sticker to mention the slip of paper inside the fancy case that contains directions on how to download two more tracks from the Merge website — a nearly 8 minute-long Damian Taylor remix of the defiant guitar rocker “Ready To Start” that puts a bit more emphasis on ambient electronics and, toward the end, morphs into something resembling a four-on-the-floor dance number, and a solo piano demo of the ruminative “Sprawl I.” Oh, and the slow swinging “Wasted Hours” now has a climactic coda that adds 1:04 to the original and begs the question, “what was singer/songwriter/guitarist Win Butler thinking when he shortened the song to begin with?”

         All of which is well and good. Jonze’s film puts a compelling if somewhat fragmented narrative to a dystopian storyline the disc only hints at; “Speaking in Tongues,” which features a vocal cameo by David Byrne, is as good as anything on the original disc; and there’s nothing wrong with an extra three-and-a-half minutes of “Ready To Start.” But what are all those hundreds of thousands of fans who already shelled out their hard-earned cash for The Suburbs meant to do? Are four-and-a-half “new” tracks, a DVD, and some fancy packaging really enough to justify buying the same album for the second time in a year?

         Now, I don’t mean to be critical of Arcade Fire or of Merge: they’ve both done a remarkable job promoting a remarkably good album over the past year. And there’s certainly nothing new about repackaging and reissuing “deluxe” versions of classic recordings. (In fact, you could make a good argument that mining the vaults has played a big role in keeping major labels afloat for the past dozen or so years — the monetary investment is relatively minimal, and any business that can get consumers to buy the same item two or three times over is clearly doing something right.) I’ve got my original vinyl copy of the Stones’ Exile On Main St., a limited edition CD version that came out in the mid-’90s, and the double-disc, 25^th anniversary edition that was released just a few years ago. Same goes for Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, which I’ve got on vinyl, CD, and, as of 2007, a deluxe 2-CD format. I’m keeping ’em all.

         Of course, much has changed since I plunked down cash for vinyl back in the day. Most recently, Billboard wisely began including iTunes downloads as sales in its “Top 200” chart. But, for all the convenience that streaming, file-sharing, and downloading may offer, for a hardcore music fan like myself, there’s just something qualitatively different and more satisfying about owning the thing itself, particularly if it’s got a fancy case, extra tracks, and an 80-page booklet. It gets at a concept that the music industry has been surprisingly slow to pick up on — namely that when people purchase an album, they’re not buying the music so much as they’re buying into an identity and acquiring a fetish object with a weight that’s both physical and conceptual. Owning a copy of The Suburbs, in regular or reissued form, isn’t the same as having the tracks on your iPod, much less streaming or even sharing them on SoundCloud. Sure, you can show your friends your iTunes list, assuming they have the patience. But until Apple comes up with a revolutionary new app, you can’t put any of that on a shelf in your living room.

THE DECEMBERISTS LIVE 8/3/11 CHARLOTTESVILLE

The Decemberists enjoy a hot night in Charlottesville

By Burg Staff on Aug. 11, 2011
BY MATT ASHARE

The Decemberists; August 3, 2011; nTelos Wireless Pavilion, Charlottesville, VA

HOT SHOTS: The Decemberists sweat it out in Charlottesville

“You look hot,“ singer/guitarist Colin Meloy jokingly taunted the sweaty masses gathered to see his Portland, Oregon-based the Decemberists at Charlottesville’s outdoor nTelos Wireless Pavilion on the steamy evening of Aug. 3. “And you look pretty attractive too,“ the black-suited, bearded and bespectacled Meloy added cheekily, looking rather fine himself if he’d been a professor at a wine-and-cheese mixer and not the front man of a band riding a wave of near universal acclaim in what amounts to one of the bigger success stories of 2011.
     It’s a rare treat to witness — as many of us did with the Arcade Fire last year — the confident emergence of a band out of the comfort of cult stardom into something much larger and, progressively, harder to define. It can also be unsettling, as Gina Arnold detailed in her 1993 book about the rise of alternative rock, Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana (St. Martin’s Press). It used to be viewed as “selling out.“ Increasingly, though, it appears as if more and more people are simply “buying in” to a broader idea of what a big-time band can look and sound like.
     That would certainly apply to the Decemberists, who, after a PSA-style recorded introduction by the mayor of Portland — he encouraged the crowd to close their eyes and imagine they were all in a vast pine-tree forest— hit the stage in exaggeratedly formal attire. Nate Query, who switched between electric and stand-up bass, sported a white button-down shirt and black vest. Multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk, who spent most of the set playing an electric or an acoustic 12-string guitar, topped off his vintage suit ensemble with a handsome porkpie hat. And new addition Sarah Watkins was resplendent in a long, blue-print dress, as she embellished the largely acoustic arrangements with fiddle, keyboards, background harmonies, and, on the more electrified new “This Is Why We Fight,“ harmonica and an nicely distorted guitar lead. (Longtime member Sarah Conlee is on leave from the band battling breast cancer, and Meloy was kind enough to give her a shout out while letting fans know that she’s’ amassed a fine collection of “colorful head scarves.“)
     Meloy has always been drawn to folk idioms: swinging sea chanteys like “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” from 2005’s Picaresque; the two-stepping, fiddle-laced c&w of “All Arise” from this year’s The King Is Dead: English dance hall fare like the rollicking “The Chimbley Sweep” from 2003’s Her Majesty the Decemberists. All three tunes made it into the Charlottesville set, which had to be one of the quieter arena-rock shows I can remember seeing in quite some time. Parents danced with their kids amid strollers parked on the upper lawn area, while Meloy encouraged the college-age fans who were his original base to sing along to songs spanning a decade of Decemberists recordings, including the slowly swaying “Oceanside,“ a track from the band’s 2001 debut EP 5 Songs, which they opened the evening with. A playful Meloy, who’s developed a low-key, often self-deprecating manner of commanding a big stage, even reprised a deep cut from the 2008 solo acoustic EP Colin Meloy Sings Live! — “Dracula’s Daughter” — introducing it as “the worst song I’ve ever written.“ And late in the set, he handed the microphone over to drummer John Moen, got behind the kit, and the band launched into a messy, improv blues that ended with Moen writhing on the floor.
     Whether those seemingly unguarded moments were staged or not doesn’t entirely matter. The effect was to bring a little off-the-cuff, indie-rock charm along for a ride that has thousands of new fans jumping aboard the Decemberists’ mainstream train. Yes, they powered through the jangling, R.E.M.-ish “Calamity Song,“ the pounding, Neil Youngian “Down By the Water,“ and the charged anthem “This Is Why We Fight” — three tunes from the new album that have helped redefine the Decemberists as a radio-friendly, Grammy-worthy entity. And, yes, all three were, well, to borrow a word from Meloy’s opening joke, “hot.“
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/the_decemberists_enjoy_a_hot_night_in_charlottesville

FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE

Fountains of Wayne deliver another perfect power-pop gem

By The Burg Staff on Aug. 03, 2011

BY MATT ASHARE

STACY'S MEN: Power-pop hooks + Brill Building Songsmanship = Fountains of Wayne

Smart, sharply written power-pop bands — from the Hollies, the Raspberries, and up through Cheap Trick and the Cars — have, at least since the heyday of Buddy Holly and the Beatles, had a place in the realm of rock. There’s just something timeless about marrying a catchy chorus to a well-honed hook, throwing just the right amount of muscle behind a memorable melody, and letting it rip. Unfortunately, the structures of power-pop don’t often allow for much wiggle room: there’s a formula to it, and it’s often difficult for even the best power-pop songs not to come off as, well, a tad formulaic — as mere novelties stripped of rock’s presumed weightiness.
     Singer/guitarist Chris Collingwood and bassist Adam Schlesinger are consummate songwriters who have been practicing the art of power-pop in the NYC-based band Fountains of Wayne since 1996. They’re more referential than reverential in their approach, which is to say that as often as you might catch echoes of the past in their tightly constructed compositions, they never descend to mere parroting or, for that matter, parody. Their biggest hit to date, 2003’s “Stacy’s Mom," is littered with musical nods in the general direction of the Cars — from the “Just What I Need” guitar figure that kicks off the first verse, to the vintage synths that run through the chorus, to the “Best Friend’s Girl” handclaps that emerge at the end. But the innocent exuberance of the song, an ode to a dude who falls in lust with his girlfriend’s mom, is pure FoW fun.
     For a band this immediately accessible — a band who have generally scored well with critics — FoW have found commercial success remarkably elusive. They’ve often been mentioned in the same breath as Weezer, but unlike Rivers Cuomo’s West-Coast weirdo, geek-boy charisma, Collingwood and Schlesinger are a team who tend to something more along the lines of the nostalgic charm of buttoned-down Brill Building songsmanship.
“I-95’“ the yearningly lovelorn single from their fourth album, 2007’s Traffic and Weather, is less about the object of the singer’s affections than about the amusing knick-knacks one finds at a typical rest stop along the highway that runs up and down the East Coast: “They’ve got most of the ‘Barney’ DVDs/Coffee mugs and tees that say ‘Virginia is for Lovers’.“ The plaintive yet playful “Michael and Heather At the Baggage Claim” is a bit like a “Seinfeld” script set to music: nothing really happens, but that’s the point.

Fountains of Wayne, Sky Full of Holes (Yep-Roc)

Perhaps what works in a sitcom doesn’t translate to a pop song. Or maybe Collingwood and Schlesinger just have a different audience in mind. Either way, it would be hard to find fault with anything on Sky Full of Holes, the new FoW disc, which brings the band (including longtime guitarist and drummer Jody Porter and Brian Young) to the Birchmere in Alexandria for a two-night stand, Aug. 7 and 8. The first single, “A Dip in the Ocean," is a breezy, driving-with-the-windows-down summer cooler replete with bubbly melodies that, in typical FoW fashion, belie the narrator’s reticence about a beach holiday misadventure (“Are we bored in this place/I’m assured the procedure is painless”). “The Summer Place” uses a similar strategy, framing the story of family dysfunction with upbeat acoustic guitars, a sing-along chorus, and a pretty harpsichord bridge that has Collingwood crooning, “At 15/shoplifting/Was the only game she liked to play/At 40/She’s so bored/She thinks about it/Then decides to pay."
     Simple fun in the sun has never been this band’s cup of tea. But poignant character sketches are right up their alley. The country-tinged “Workingman’s Hands” brings to mind a wistful Glen Campbell with its touchingly vivid portrait of blue-collar life and Collingwood intoning, “Oh you save your money for a hole in the ground, a black car, and a long wall of roses." And in “Action Hero,“ fingerpicked acoustic guitar gets support from surging powerchords as a husband with a wife and three kids deals with the little messes of life and the bigger concern of his looming mortality.
    Collingwood also does confessional quite well, subverting the cliché of the life-on-the-road song with, yes, “Road Song," a pedal steel-laced rootsy number sung as a phone call to his girl back home that rhymes “Cracker Barrel” with “Will Ferrell” and includes this chorus: “I know it’s not what you’d call necessary/And I know that I’m no Steve Perry/But even if you roll your eyes and groan/I’m still writing you a road song that you can call your own."
     It may not be Top 40 material, but anyone who can drop a Journey reference into a country song about the rigors of band life is totally cool in my book.
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_fountains_of_wayne_deliver_another_perfect_power-pop_gem