Arcade Fire
It’s always a celebration when a new Arcade Fire album is announced.
WE is due in May.
“Lightning I, II” is the new first song.
Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire and the great Mavis Staples raise their voices in these troubled times.
All proceeds benefit the ACLU.
I Give You Power by Arcade Fire featuring Mavis Staples
Will Butler
Will Butler, the multi-instrumentalist and dynamic performer of the band Arcade Fire (and brother of frontman Win Butler) has a solo debut in March.
Last year he and Owen Pallett were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for the film Her.
“Anna” is a free download from his album Policy.
Peter Gabriel and Arcade Fire
In 2010 Peter Gabriel recorded an album entitled Scratch My Back.
It consisted of gorgeous cover versions of songs by artists that he admires, including Lou Reed, Bon Iver, Regina Spektor, Radiohead, David Bowie, Talking Heads and Arcade Fire.
Many of these same artists have returned the favor by recording his songs on the album And I’ll Scratch Yours.
Listen here to Peter Gabriel’s version of Arcades Fires’ “My Body is a Cage” and then Arcades Fire performing Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers”.
“My Body is a Cage”
“Games Without Frontiers”
Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire, one of the finest outfits of the 21st century, has readied their 4th album, Reflektor.
Working with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, the amazing first single includes David Bowie on background vocals.
Expect the album in late October. In the meantime the band continues to push the limits of video technology with “Reflektor”. To have the experience, you need Google Chrome.
Arcade Fire
The Hunger Games film is due later this month.
Arcade Fire has contributed a new song to the soundtrack.
Listen here to “Abraham’s Daughter”.
Mr. Little Jeans
Mr. Little Jeans is the pseudonym deftly utilized by Monica Birkenes.
The name comes from a character in the film Rushmore.
She’s a Norwegian, living in London and recording recently in Los Angeles.
She delicately and lovingly and hauntingly transforms Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” into her own song.
[jwplayer mediaid=”4724″]
Bonnaroo
Bonnaroo, the four day music and arts festival, begins today in Manchester, Tennessee.
This is the tenth year and the lineup is stellar.
In celebration of Bonnaroo, RCRDLBL has released from their archives a free download of 24 bands performing this year including Arcade Fire, Florence and the Machine, Sleigh Bells, Best Coast, Iron & Wine, and the Black Angels among others.
Featured here is Twin Shadow, the nom de plume of George Lewis, Jr., who developed his chops in Boston before reinventing himself in Brooklyn.
“I Can’t Wait” is from his debut album Forget.
[jwplayer mediaid=”4633″]
Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire will release a deluxe version of The Suburbs this summer.
Included will be a 30 minute film by Spike Jonze entitled Scenes From the Suburbs, an 80 page booklet with photos and lyrics and two unreleased tracks: “Culture War” and “Speaking in Tongues”.
“Speaking in Tongues” features backing vocals by David Byrne. A tongue in cheek homage no doubt to the Talking Heads album of the same title.
Thursday Podcast
Artists featured on today’s podcast include:
Toro Y Moi
Travis Barker
Arcade Fire
tUnE-yArDs
The Raveonettes
Beady Eye
Dom
Burial, Four Tet, Thom Yorke
Warpaint
Bright Eyes
Dum Dum Girls
Bad Religion
White Denim
Hear it on CyberStationUSA at 5:00 pm Eastern and on-demand thereafter.
2010/2011
The world of music is cyclical and goes into hiatus a few weeks before Christmas and into the new year. Slowly new music is released in January and gains momentum later in the winter flowing into the spring.
Bands that enthralled me last year included Arcade Fire, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Avi Buffalo, Badly Drawn Boy, Beach House, Belle & Sebastian, Best Coast, Blonde Redhead, Delorean, The Drums, Dum Dum Girls, Eminem, Girl Talk, Glasser, Gorillaz, Janelle Monáe, Joanna Newsom, Karen Elson, Laura Marling, Lykke Li, Matt & Kim, Mumford & Sons, The National, No Age, Perfume Genius, Phoenix, School of Seven Bells, She & Him, Shearwater, Sleigh Bells, Stars, Titus Andronicus and Warpaint.
And The xx continued to give me great pleasure.
Here you will hear the best new music as it becomes available.
Next week we will have an exclusive Cure video.
Happy New Year indeed.
Mark Ronson covers Arcade Fire: Free download
Mark Ronson, is the highly acclaimed English DJ, producer (Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen, Kaiser Chiefs) and musician whose 2008 album, Version, garnered numerous British awards. He has just released his third album, Record Collection, billed as Mark Ronson & the Business Intl. While we’re absorbing this new offering, he has recorded a live version of Arcade Fire’s “We Used To Wait” which is available as a free download and is the Song of the Day.
[jwplayer mediaid=”4422″]
“We Used to Wait” by Mark Ronson and the Business Intl.
Arcade Fire: The Suburbs
Mine was a driving vacation, a chance to listen to music uninterrupted, enveloped in my moving audio bubble, along miles and miles of highways. I discovered numerous compelling songs that will be presented here in the weeks to come, but it was the album, The Suburbs, by Arcade Fire that I continually returned too. The disc explores the environs where many of us grew up in–and what much of this and many countries have become–the homogenized beige living space with little connection to space and time. The endless boredom, hours wandering, wasted time, a longing to escape and the realization that there will be nothing to return to.
“Now our loves are changing fast
Hope that something pure can last.”
There are so many good songs of differing styles that my faves change from day to day. Here is a punk rave-up called “Month of May” and a song of suburban sprawl (“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”). The title track “The Suburbs” was heard here on this site in June, so I’ve included the beautiful coda to that song that ends the album. One of the albums of the year, these are the Songs of the Day.
“Month of May”
[jwplayer mediaid=”4338″]
“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”
[jwplayer mediaid=”6229″]
“The Suburbs (Continued)”
[jwplayer mediaid=”6230″]
Arcade Fire
Of the hundreds upon hundreds of rock shows that I have attended over the years, only a couple of dozen can be described as truly transcendent. And of those, when the band was new, the songs mostly unknown and when I had no pre-conceived notions of the artistry, only a rare few have mesmerized me from the ring of first note to the last sustain of the encore. A performance where after the cheering had died and the lights had come up, I stood enraptured, basking in the afterglow of a great artistic experience, floating in a sea of wondrous thought knowing that I had witnessed something transformative.
One such performance for me was by the Arcade Fire. This band from Montreal will soon release their third album, Suburbs. From that album, the song of the same name is the Song of the Day.
[jwplayer mediaid=”4244″]
“Suburbs” by Arcade Fire
Oedipus Podcast #2: Canadian Olympian Music
We had some friends over the other night who wanted to watch the opening ceremony of the winter Olympics. Hopefully you didn’t waste precious moments of your life viewing this sorry excuse for a spectacle. It was like a bad high school production with a large budget. Ok, let me say it straight. It sucked! Sorry to my friends North. And as the commentators fell all over themselves telling us how wonderful it was, I could not help thinking that it certainly was not the Canada that I know and love. Musically it did give proper deference to Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, but the rest were American Idol wannabes. Where was Neil Young or even Rush for that matter, the latter at least having a prominent cameo in the popular film I Love You Man. Here are few other artists that I think of when I think of Canada.
[jwplayer mediaid=”4049″]
Metric
Tegan and Sara
The New Pornographers
Ron Sexsmith
Tara MacLean
Peaches
Delerium
Arcade Fire
Skinny Puppy
Sum 41