Thanks to my son Eliot and an interesting story in a recent New Yorker, I bought the two albums on iTunes by this Montreal group, forgot about it, then on the flight to Beijing plugged the noise-cancellers into the laptop and fired up Funeral and Neon Bible.
This is not a Canadian joke. Who could have thought an accordion and violins could rock? Arcade Fire evokes the Talking Heads at their peak, a little Bowie, a little T. Rex, a little Jane’s Addiction. In short, several of my favorites from the 70s. But weirder, smarter somehow, awesome stuff, I highly recommend them. Good YouTube sample here.
Not only do they rock, their label (Merge Records) is right in your backyard in Durham, NC.
Dave, Check out the ‘Asylum Street Spankers’, Youtube video; ‘Stick another Ribbon on yoyr SUV’. They’re an Austin Tejas band, I saw last week in Seattle. Smart, provocative music, w/ a little cheek. Cheers JRN
in case anyone’s interested, both of the mentioned arcade fire albums can be purchased in a non-DRM’d MP3 format from emusic.com. see here:
http://www.emusic.com/artist/11590/11590044.html
btw, if you like weird combos of accordions, violins and so on, try beirut or devotchka.
Asylum Street Spankers live recordings are available on Archive.org in the Live Music Archive – great stuff for a party, but decidedly John Valby-like.