From the ACL Taping Program on September 14, 2007:
Hailed as the “band who helped put Canadian music on the world map” by TIME magazine, experimental indie rock septet Arcade Fire has wowed audiences with its anthemic sound and emotionally-charged lyrics. The band’s complex, full sound combines diverse instrumentation with often brooding lyrics that “draw grand lessons from everyday life” (The New York Times).Started by husband-wife duo Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, the band’s first album Funeral debuted in September 2004, titled for the deaths of several relatives of band members during recording. Despite the somber atmosphere of the album, the band’s sound and lyrics remained prolific. “Amid all the loss and breakups, Arcade Fire manage to be strangely joyous,” said Rolling Stone. “Funeral captures the agony and even ecstasy of surviving death all around you.”
The band’s anticipated second album, Neon Bible, was self-produced in the basement of a church in a small town outside of Montreal. Featuring several different instruments, such as accordions and hurdy-gurdies, Neon Bible’s “polyphonic swirl of strings, horns and voices points toward transcendence” (Entertainment Weekly). Paste wrote Neon Bible is “dark and well crafted, if not another masterpiece.”
Stylus Magazine wrote that Arcade Fire has “embraced the sound of sound, the odd spaces and noises that bristle a record’s edges with the feel that an album’s actually recorded in life, in time, in a room with walls and equipment and pal tunes here reflect the more organic sound of a band playing in a room, with musicians turning ideas into grooves, which in turn become songs.”
