Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Record of the Month

I figured I'd do a monthly 'what I'm listening to' kind of thing. This could be viewed as a lame placeholder kind of post. And probably it is. But it's my blog! So there!


I reviewed Arcade Fire's second disk, The Neon Bible, a while back. It was their first one I purchased. But they did have have a debut disk, Funeral, which I'm just now getting around to putting out here.

I've only had it for about a year, but the disk is actually pushing being five years old. Clearly, they take their time with what they put out.

By reading the reviews in places like amazon, their fan base clearly prefers Funeral over Neon Bible. I'm not of this ilk.

Neon Bible really struck a chord with me. Funeral is ok, and for me, it shows a lot of potential of what they could become, but I'm also working backwards, so who knows how it would have played out if I had heard it first.

The good things about it are that it is still very innovative. With the number of band members and the array of instruments that they play, and the combinations in which they play them is still way different than anything else out there now, or in 2004.

They also mixed it up a bit more with vocalists. Win Butler still provides the majority of the lead, but now and again Regine Chassagne will take over. This doesn't happen on their follow-up recording.

There are some really good songs on here - "Neighborhood #1" (there are four "Neighborhood" songs) and "In the Backseat", which has Chassagne's Bjork-like vocals on it. Then there is the funness of "Wake Up".

That all being said, overall, the disk just did not gel for me. I can't pinpoint what about it just isn't doing it for me. It's not a bad disk, but with all the positive reviews I guess I was expecting so much more.

I guess that's what I get for reading reviews before purchasing. Let this be a lesson to you all.



Oh.....wait........

2 comments:

Birdie said...

I bought this CD on the strength of "Intervention." You might enjoy this video of "Neon Bible." Love the percussion.

Birdie said...

Whoops - make that the other CD. I have to agree that "Funeral" didn't cut it for me.