Live: The Arcade Fire

Posted on November 14, 2004 at 7:45 pm | No Comments

Had I sat down and written about Friday night’s set by Montreal’s The Arcade Fire immediately after coming home from it, you’d be reading a bunch of gushing, over the top gibberish. Seriously… it’d have been a stammering, probably embarrassing, hyperbolic freak-out, struggling for new adjectives, paragraphs that boiled down to ‘Um… Wow!’.

Two days later, I’m still feeling it, still reeling from it, hardly coming down. It was one of those mouth-opening shows, standing there slack-jawed and smiling from beginning to end, feeling sorry for every single other person in the world who isn’t in the room.

At 11:30 on Friday night, 45 minutes before they were due hit the stage, I was actually laying comfortably in bed. I was drained from a long week, from Silkworm the night before, and besides, it was freakin’ cold out. Boston was covered in it’s first (and far too early) snowfall of the year, but at that very moment, openers The Hidden Cameras were probably on stage over at TT the Bears. I have absolutely no idea where I found the motivation to rise, bundle up, clean the damn snow off my car, and get across the river to Cambridge. Actually, yes I do… it came from here. Their debut album, one of the best of the year. I just had to know if they could possibly, even remotely, recreate it live. And boy, uh, did they ever.

The sold-out crowd was equal parts excited fans, hopeful hipsters, and clueless college students who were there because it was ‘the place to be’ on that particular friday night. And every single damn one of ’em was swept up in what happened when the seven people on stage broke into the “Whooooooaaaa…oooohhhh!” vocals of “Wake Up”, the first song. Seven voices yelling out in unison, it just sounded huge. I’ve been to TTs more times than I care to recall, and I have never heard a band sound this good, mixed this perfectly. Seven band members, all playing instruments, at times all singing. Drums, strings, keyboard, vibra-muh-phone, guitar, bass, tamborines, motorcyle helmet, accordian… I could hear every single note, every voice. I was just floored.

They actually introduced that first song with “This is our last song, thanks for coming!”, and I’m sure there are people who still would have thought they got their money’s worth had that been true. Playing and sweating for over an hour, they did mostly songs from Funeral, along with a couple from their self-released debut EP, what may be a brand new one (that’s open for debate), and a well-chosen cover.

Y’know, I’m not one for crowds, and I’m the first guy to run screaming from sold-out shows. We were jam-packed into TTs, and as I suffered through 15 minutes of shoulder-to-shoulder pre-set jostling, I wondered if this could possibly be worth it. If anything could be. After midnight, that’s when the sloppy drunks come out, and TTs was brimming with ’em. Loud talkers, slurring idiots, rude, jockeying louts. Fortunately, that all disappeared when The Arcade Fire started up. Nothing bothered me from that moment on… I swear, someone coulda been punching me in the neck for the whole hour, and I still would have exclaimed “Best show ever!”. Just amazing.

And I recorded the whole damn thing. At this moment, having listened to it nearly a dozen times this weekend, it’s the crown of my live collection. It seems logically impossible that their sound, the overwhelming hugeness comin’ from that stage, could have been funneled into a little clip-on microphone… but somehow it was. It’s a testament to their soundperson Sharon (who used to work at the Middle East) that you can make out every instrument in a single-mic recording. Just genius.

The Arcade Fire

Live at TT the Bears
Cambridge, MA, Nov. 12th, 2004

note: this set was reposted here on 3/6/2007

01. Wake Up
02. Neighborhood #2 (Laika)
03. Une Annee Sans Lumiere
04. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) / Rebellion (Lies)
05. This Must Be The Place (Talking Heads)
06. Haiti
07. Headlights Look Like Diamonds
08. Burning Bridges (unreleased)
09. Crown of Love
10. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
11. No Cars Go
12. In The Backseat

You could hear the shouts of pure joy near the beginning of each song, people just letting out an unfiltered “Yeah!!!”, like we’re at some olde tyme evangelical revival. “Praise The Arcade Fire! Have Mercy!”. I love the moment where some guy yells out a perfectly unrestrained “Holy SHIT!”. We were all caught up in it… the crowd swaying and smiling and jumping and cheering and appreciating everything in front of us.

I could go on, and on, and on some more. Get me talking about this in person and my eyes’ll light up, you’ll understand what this show did for me. Amie could tell, and she’s making me take her along when they come back “in the dead of winter”, as the band said from the stage. A stage they’d already outgrown before they even arrived.

So, yeah, um… Wow!

[Live MP3s] Silkworm at Great Scott, Allston 2004

Posted on November 12, 2004 at 10:53 am | No Comments

(update 12/28/2010: Re-upped the set, doubled the encoding size. You’re welcome.)

Memo to myself: You are definitely not too old to check out late-running rock shows on weeknights. You are, however, too old to stay up for an additional three hours, editing audio files and playing Halo 2. Three hours of sleep doesn’t come close to cutting it.

So I’m paying for it this morning, but oh it was so worth it. Not the Halo 2 part, although that was pretty fun. I’m talking about seeing Silkworm and the Karl Hendricks Trio at Great Scott in Allston last night. Or was it this morning? It’s kind of a blur. I blame the bands (and the Dunkies coffee) for getting me so wired up I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards.

I owe Mr. Karl Hendricks an apology… I quite simply lost track of his still-excellent band from Pittsburgh. In 1996 I worked at a little indie record store up in Burlington, Vermont, and Merge had sent us a promo copy of KHT’s For a While, It Was Funny. I played that sucker to death, knew it by heart, but for some random reason didn’t keep up with their subsequent output. I’ll have to fix that, because last night showed that Mr. Hendrick’s songwriting is still up to snuff. I woulda bought their latest if I hadn’t spent my last ten bucks on beer. Hopefully it won’t be another 8 years before they’re back in Boston.

As drummer Michael Dalquist changed into his rock-shorts, and Tim Midgett and Andy Cohen waited for him on stage, I wondered if Silkworm would treat us to an oldie or two. That question was quickly answered as Michael sat down and started tap-tap-tapping the intro to “Swings”, off 1996’s Firewater (probably my favorite SKWM record. maybe.) What a freakin’ treat. And not only did we expectedly get stuff from the new record, It’ll Be Cool, but we even heard a couple new ones. Right on.

They ended up playing a 14-song set that seemed all too short. Y’know, I’ve never had a less than great time at a Silkworm show, and while this set wasn’t as mind-bending as the last couple times I’ve seen ’em, it was inspiring as always. Felt a little bad that they didn’t have a larger crowd, but they were up against the Blues Explosion down the street and Pedro the Lion across the river. The show also got very little promotion, as it was at the relatively unknown (at least for rock shows) Great Scott’s in Allston. Much thanks to The Plan for giving these guys a place to play.

Here, have some live mp3s from last night. I stayed up late so you didn’t have to…

Silkworm
Live at The Plan / Great Scott
Allston, MA, Nov. 11th, 2004

01. Swings
02. Eff
03. Penalty Box
04. Raging Bull
05. Slave Wages
06. Lily White & Cherry Red
07. Insomnia
08. The Third
09. The Old You
10. The Operative
11. Is She A Sign?
12. (I Hope You) Don’t Survive
13. Don’t Look Back

I guessed at the titles of the new ones. I also got a few songs from the Karl Hendricks Trio set, so I’ll be posting those sometime soon. They’re good, but not quite good enough to keep me up another hour this morning. I’m not sure anything is.

Tonight: A sold-out Arcade Fire show at TT the Bears. Keep an eye out for mp3s from that one over the weekend. I hope.

I’ve never been more in need of a power nap than I am right now.