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review: I must confess: I'm a little late to the Arcade Fire frenzy. And I must also confess that a lot of my initial interest in them was generated from hearing how insane they are live. I heard that they tend to get all crazy, climbing up on each other's backs as they play their instruments, everyone yelling the lyrics out at once, other assorted wacky stage antics. When we saw them perform at Sasquatch this past summer, I was too short to see a single thing, but Mike told me later that they were completely zany, banging drumsticks on every available surface, draping flags on each other as they played, shouting at the audience...
And then somewhere along the line, I started enjoying their music more too! Huh. I think I just have this natural aversion towards anything that's really popular (see: Harry Potter, Modest Mouse, etc., etc.), so I never really gave them much of a chance.
So fast forward to last night, and we got to see them at the majestic, gorgeous, beautiful Paramount Theatre here in Seattle thanks to the awesome KEXP, who was sponsoring the show! The Paramount is pretty huge, and we were up in the Mezzanine balcony. On the floor, they had taken out all the seats, so people were all standing, crushed up towards the foot of the stage. We got there kinda late and missed seeing openers Bell Orchestre (featuring members of Arcade Fire) and Wolf Parade though.
I can only imagine what it must've been like to see them perform at some small club like The Crocodile or something back when they were first starting out. I bet the energy and antics were so much more electric and jaw-dropping and raw. Seeing them at the Paramount, from far up in the balcony, their antics seemed to lack a little vitality. One of their violinists, dressed in an all-white sailor suit, kept dropping between songs and doing push-ups. During the songs, they would sometimes run back and forth in a little path, charging towards each other and then retreating. There was some manic beating on monitors, on the stage floor, on amplifiers. But, I don't know, from far away, it seemed a little forced. Also, it didn't help that with the stage lighting, the other band members would be acting kooky, but the spotlight would be on lead vocalist Win Butler, or his wife Régine Chassagne.
Despite the lame lighting, they did have a cute stage set-up with four floor lamps around them, and a couch off to the side up on a platform. The french horn player kept reclining, barefoot, on the couch when he wasn't playing. A large graphic of an upside down house with "Arcade Fire" written in a swirly "Cure-esque" font was projected behind them.
I overheard someone saying that they played the exact same set-list, in order, the last time they saw them live, so anyone who's seen them on tour probably knows the line-up. They opened with "Wake Up", and played pretty much every song of their album, Funeral. Régine was dancing so nutty during "Haiti" that the red flower in her hair fell out. They also covered a David Bowie song that they mentioned they performed with him for the "Fashion Rocks" TV special but it got cut from the broadcast. (I think it was called "Fascination", but I could be wrong...)
For their last song, they actually marched off stage and down onto the floor, still playing their instruments (those that could travel unplugged, that is). The house lights came on, and we all thought the show was over, and we proceeded to file out of the theatre only to find that the band had re-convened in the lobby stairwell and were STILL PLAYING! They did a cute acoustic version of "Queen Bitch" by David Bowie, with Régine playing the main guitar bit on her accordion. SO incredibly cute and magical, and it kinda gave me that tiny bubble of awe in my tummy that had been missing all night. Aww! (janice 09.05)