The Arcade Fire conspiracy grows

A while back, I posted about the strange fact that just about every Genius playlist I did in iTunes included at least one Arcade Fire song. Now, I still use and really like the Genius feature, and have discovered I can do it in two ways.

One is to run Genius on my iPod, and let it pick from the 4504 songs on board. The other is to run Genius on my PC collection, with 10,053 songs, including all those on my iPod, but also stuff from my family, stuff I have had once on my iPod and then left off (and often forgot about), and stuff which is so odd that I frankly have no idea how it got there.



The element of unpredictability and fun in Genius is thus clearly much greater for me to use the PC version and see what the hell it comes up with. And, of course, it still comes up with a lot of Arcade Fire. Naturally.

However, last week when I ran genius for Tindersticks' wonderful 'The not knowing', it found and reminded me about a live version of 'Five years' by David Bowie and Arcade Fire from something (rather off-puttingly) called 'Fashion Rocks'. I think I bought an EP of this from iTunes ages ago and actually never listened to it then but the song is brilliant! See it below:



As it happens, looking for that video clip on Youtube led me directly to the following version of Joy Division's 'Love will tear us apart' (which, for some mad reason, Genius proved unable to build a playlist for recently) by U2 and, yes, Arcade Fire. It is misjudged and overcrowded and very Bono but there is an endearing ramshackleness about it and I must admit a real soft spot for people carrying single drums and hitting them very hard, as happens a lot here.



So, in a conspiracy worthy of Dan Brown but actually interesting and without illuminati, the vatican, mad monks, or Tom Hanks involved (thank God), Arcade Fire are stalking my music collection, and I feel I may yet fall unavoidably under their spell. In the meantime, I will keep up the fight, and post occasional dispatches from the front line here.

As something of a soothing dessrt after the heavyness of those last two tracks, I found a clip of the aforementioned 'The not knowing' by Tindersticks here:



The live version does not quite do justice to the soft baroque beauty of the album version, of their 1992 debut, but it is still a simple piece of earthfallen heaven.