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| Photo
credit: Win Butler |
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The
Arcade Fire spent most of 2006 holed up in a small church
in a small town outside of Montreal. They were recording
their second album NEON BIBLE. It was a slow year, mostly.
The couple years before that had been rather hectic. Funeral,
their first album, was released in September of 2004.
The moment it came out, the Arcade Fire were caught up
in a flurry of activity that left none dead but several
wounded. A lot of people liked Funeral a lot. Reviews
were insanely positive, from local Montreal press to New
York Times feature articles.
Shows, too, were selling out. In 2004, the Arcade Fire
were playing small venues packed to the gills with 100,
maybe 200 people. After Funeral came out, the size of
the shows slowly crept up. A lot of people liked the shows
a lot. You could probably argue that the live show was
better than the record. Don’t get me wrong, the
record was really good. But so too was the live show.
By the end of 2005, the Arcade Fire were playing largish
venues packed to the gills with thousands of people, in
shows that had sold out in ridiculously short amounts
of time. This all was a little overwhelming. Nice, but
weird.
Nice but weird things happened to the Arcade Fire all
of 2005. They played a Talking Heads song with David Byrne
at one of their shows, and then got to open for him at
the Hollywood Bowl. They got to perform with David Bowie,
both in concert and on national TV. They got to go to
Japan and Sweden and Brazil. They got to perform a very
poorly rehearsed version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart
(Again)” with U2. So all in all, by the time the
year ended, the Arcade Fire were pretty damn tired. Happy
and satisfied, yes, but really tired.
Coming off a year of intense touring, they wanted to just
sit down and write some songs. And then record them. So
they found a church out in a small town and turned it
into a studio. They moved in all their amps and instruments,
bought some nice curtains, stocked the fridge, and hunkered
down. They were in no rush.
They knew they were working on an album, but didn’t
know how long it would be, or what it would be called,
or what songs would be on it, or what instruments would
be on the songs. They knew they would produce it themselves,
though—they had too many musical plans pent up in
their brains to hand control over to someone else. So
they found some grand engineers to make those musical
plans reality—Markus Dravs (Bjork, James, Brian
Eno) and Scott Colburn (Sun City Girls, Animal Collective).
Slowly the songs came together. They found a huge pipe
organ in a huge church in Montreal and recorded it. They
bought some bass steel drums and some bass synths. They
got a hurdy-gurdy. They called in friends for help: Martin
Wenk and Jacob Valenzuela, the horn players from Calexico,
came in for a song. Hadjii Bakara from Wolf Parade added
some bleep and bloops and sonic weirdness. Owen Pallett,
Final Fantasy, helped to orchestrate (as he did on Funeral).
Pietro Amato and his horn playing associates added some
brass. The band traveled to Budapest to record an orchestra
and a military choir. And besides all this, the band just
played music together. They played the songs that were
going on the album. They played songs that wouldn’t
go on the album. They played cover songs. It was all quite
nice, really.
All this took about a year. The band worked and played
and worked, and as Christmas 2006 approached the recording
was finished. NEON BIBLE was full of both half-assed punk
rock mistakes and meticulously orchestrated woodwinds.
Processed strings and mandolin. Quiet rumbles and loud
rumbles. But mostly just eleven songs that the band thinks
are really good. And that might be of some public interest.
So, on with 2007.
For more information, call 1-866-NEON BIBLE toll free
or visit www.neonbible.com |
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NEON
BIBLE
MERGE RECORDS
2007 |
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