Okay, that was a bad Kings of Leon pun to start with!
Now, I accept that in the past I have been cynical or suspicious of Arcade Fire (like here, here and here), but then 'The suburbs' turned me around more than a little (as admitted here), and when I saw they were to play Dublin in December alongside Vampire Weekend, I decided that it was time to see what all the live fuss was about. I read a review of the gig here, the author of which very much shared my view on the band, and my inability to 'get' them the way others did, but this was their chance to break down my final defences and claim me for their own.
I also decided it would be my 10-year-old's first big concert, as he linked both acts, and we had not managed to get a family ticket to Electric Picnic, even after buying the tent especially (at least I got to finally see the National in Ireland in 2010, the night before the Arcade Fire gig, as ecstatically reviewed here).
It was also acrually my first concert at Dublin's key venue, the O2, which I had been to some gigs in years ago in its previous incarnation as The Point Depot (maybe Pulp, the Waterboys, and a Feile festival, if memory serves me right).
Even with dashing through the Dublin snow, we didn't get there in time for Devendra Banhart (who I had heard recommended through Uncut, and whose 'Smoky rolls down thunder mountain' I gave a good try during the week before the gig, before concluding that the cool name was my favourite thing about it), but I was quite keen to see Vampire Weekend.
Their debt was one of my favourite albums of 2008, but 'Contra' earlier this year left me severely disappointed; although it did contain my favourite song of all of their's ('Giving up the gun'), the rest of the tracks did nothing for me. Live, they came across as technically excellent (particularly the drumming) but somewhat cold and unemotional, as if they had read the textbooks on how to make passionate music and could push the buttons, but did not bring real heart and soul to the deal. All the clinical aloofness from their records was amplified on stage, and I was somewhat disappointed.
Interestingly, leaving the last three songs of your set to your debut suggested to me they might, deep down, share my view on its follow-up (they never played 'gun', alas), and my iPhone captured the three. First up was 'Oxford Comma', on which I wrote one of the first posts for this blog here, and which I still love:
Apologies for the video quality on these, as I didn't get as close as I would otherwise have, due to my small-scale apprentics. 'Oxford comma' was followed by 'Walcott', which I always also loved on album, but much of the ornate instrumentation of which was a little lost by the more basic live set up:
Finally (I think, maybe I have order mixed up) came the wonderfully oddball 'Mansard roof', which was certainly a statement of aristocractic knowing intent at the start of the debut:
Then came the break and build up to the main event, which inevitably involved a fair degree of reconstruction of the stage to fit a significantly more expansive and ambitiously instrumented Arcade Fire. They came on stage with 'Ready to start', loud and proud, and basically hurled themselves at their instruments with a level of energy and gusto which was all the more incredible for the fact that they maintained it for almost 2 hours. The waves of raw energy and passion rolling off the stage were quite astonishing, and I can understand the longstanding hype about their live shows.
The sudden spike in levels of everything, crowd adrenaline included, proved at this point a little too much for my son, so we beat a tactical retreat back a little to a place where there was more space, and so the quality of the subsequent video clips suffered a little as a result, and I didn't film as much as I might otherwise, particularly at the start. When doing a bit of research for this post, I found an incredible web-site called 'Setlist' which includes the set-list (below, thanks to their cool widget) for the gig as well as clips of all songs, albeit not from this actual gig, plus lyrics here).
I must admit that, without my audio-visual props to remind me, the first half of the gig was a bit of an overwhelming blur, with snippets of memories of band members beating hell out of drums held by other band members, and routinely swapping instruments, and the 'drive-in'-like giant screen showing a variety of images, some abstract, some less so (including some strange images for one song of what appeared to be female heads bobbing in water like something from an early 20th Century German expressionist movie, if I actually knew what those really looked like). I also remember that 'we used to wait' featured lots of images of stamps and envelopes, like an ode to a pre-emmail era.
I did capture 'The suburbs', which is a great opener to the album of that name:
and 'Intervention', which is my son's favourite:
The main set finished with 'Neighbourhood #3 (Power out)' flowing kinetically and through sheer power of momentum into 'Rebellion (Lies)'. So many of their songs do seems like several songs co-evolving together and fighting to be heard that such flow seems completely natural and organic, and I did capture it:
They came back after the perfunctory absence for 'Keep the car running' and what is apparently their traditional closer 'Wake up':
So overall, a very good gig and undeniably powerful. Their audience interaction is pretty good too, with a few reflections our economic woes and also a plea for support for Haiti before the song of the same name, and several references to Ireland being their favourite place to play (of course).
There is no doubt that their commitment, passion, musicianship and energy in a live setting are about as good as I have ever seen, and really takes the breath away. They must be one of the best live bands in the world without any doubt. My only problem comes back to my own personal relationship with the songs, which has never been that strong, despite my best efforts, and leaves in place a residual barrier to my fully engagin heart and soul with the concert. It is hard to compare this behemoth with the small scale of The National but there is no doubt that the previous night's gig, stately and sedate by comparison, meant far more to me as I knew and loved every song so completely.
However, would I go and see Arcade Fire again? In a shot.
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