the beautiful people vol 2 - Arcade Fire

The Arcade Fire make me feel about music like nothing has in a long time. Their album “Funeral” is magnificent (from the art and packaging of it to the music itself) but nothing compared as seeing them live.

They played the Astoria in London on the 9th of June. The concert had been sold out for a long time. The members of the band are Win Butler, Regine Chassagne, Richard Parry, Tim Kingsbury and William Butler. They were joined on stage on tour by Sarah Neufeld and Owen Pallett, brilliant violin players. Their sound was ten times more powerful live than it already is on the record. The audiende was stunned by the power of their music, as for me I was absolutely speechless. I can say it was the best concert I had seen in years.

The opening act was Final Fantasy aka Owen Pallett, who did a brilliant job. The audience was in fact as surprised with Owen as he was to reaction of the audience. Great start. He was by himself playing with his violin and mixing some other recorded sounds. Made me think of Herbert.

Final Fantasy over.

“Why do they have birds inside the bass drum?” was the first question I asked my friend Tom. What will happen to them once they start playing? The bass drum was transparent so we could see the birdies flying around.

Well, they played all songs from the album, and one by then unknown to my ears. That song is on their unreleased EP (will be out next week in the UK) and it sounded as good as all their Funeral material. Of course everyone knew the lyrics to Laika, Power Out, Rebellion (Lies) and Crown Of Love, but the reaction to all songs was overwhelming. You could see that on their reaction.

No birds were harmed during the making of this concert.

I was lucky enough to see them in Barcelona two weeks ago on the Primavera Sound festival. Again, it was crowd madness and unexpected reactions from both sides. To me, it was magnificent to see the same concert for the second time and feel it as tremendous as the first one.