SO, MY INTERNET CALLSIGN IS ROGER_DALTREE AND I WILL BE WRITING ABOUT MUSIC (FIRST AND FOREMOST) AND ALSO ABOUT THE MEANING OF LIFE (I won't be writing about the meaning of life.)

So I'll be honest, The Arcade Fire sucks.

They don't suck as bad as say, Creed, but as far as the indie beat goes, they aren't as good as say, Wolf Parade, or say uhhhhh, Wolfmother. Okay, okay, I realize that I just compared The Arcade Fire, to Wolfmother (I admit, a highly derivative blues-rock based rip-off band with a token Lysergic acid diethylamide influence as well as songs about fabled creatures riding the zipper at your local three-day midwestern (insert town's staple crop here)-fest.)

The Arcade Fire is basically the quintessential "indie" band, of course. You basically take the DIY (Don't Imitate Your influences- just kidding, the acronym stands for Do It Yourself) ethic that makes indie, indie and then you basically give The Arcade Fire an indiet (I think that means you make it sound less indie, but I just coined the term and it's subject for evolution and stuff. Pardon all these asides! Not to be confused with a-sides, but I digress...) SO THAT THE ARCADE FIRE SOUNDS WELL, full of vital energy and well-arranged instrumental interplay. Except, the album Funeral in particular does sound like it was recorded and produced through a sliding glass door, but we'll let that slide for the time being, as most indie is "tokenized" as having "lesser" production.

What seperates The Arcade Fire from say, TV on the Radio (A band I like very much, they know how to make really idiosyncratic funky music and they do it really well, and they experiment well!) is the consistency, as well as the aim of the sound. Every Arcade Fire song sounds as if it has three really good ideas, which then are completely mired and ruined by having some guy in the background waving a saw around to keep the tempo and then the singer Win Butler (He is not a native Montrealer, stupid asshole!) kind of overdubs his voice and has some of his bandmates sing over his voice also but in such a way that it completely fakes harmonization, but what you're getting is just a shitty vocal line. On the subject of vocals, Regine Chassagne is basically what Kim Deal from The Pixies (I couldn't make it double bold there) would sound like had Kim Deal gotten a parade of Wolves to rip out her larynx and then proceed to hibernate inside of her esophagus. I didn't purposefully make a weight joke there, but if you kind of felt what I hinted at then feel free and laugh because hey, laughs are free and they are also the best medecine (except for PiL featuring ex-Sex Pistols singer Johnny Lyndon.).

Each Arcade Fire song has some sort of meandering structure with a few hooks (The hoooook brings youuuuu baaaaaaackkkkkk, I'm eternally grateful to the Blues Travelers for their great advice, but not much else) meant to keep you in the song. What seperates the artful instrument laden Arcade Fire and their twists and turns, with say, a Progressive Rock band, is that a Progressive Rock band usually knows how to play their instruments a bit better, and seem to have a much firmer grasp of diatonic theory (IE: Staying in key) as well as having great production generally, although there are a lot of crappy prog bands. The random guitar break to violin break to Regine Chassagne solo spot to Win Bulter screaming about "Alex doing it" (that line makes me fucking cringe) doesen't sound cohesive to all at me and usually ruins the overall effect of the song for me. The arrangements are decent, but a lot of them are ruined by the sloppy recorded live inside of Foufones Electroniques sound, (This is a Montreal joke) which is a shame because The Arcade Fire sounds like they have a lot of heart (Barracuda something something) but it just gets lost in the overabundance of STUFF that they're trying to accomplish in each song and in the album as a whole.

Now, I did say that a derivative, pseudo-Black Sabbath band like Wolfmother is inherently better (I won't get into why I love TV on the Radio so much, but maybe if you're lucky...) is because Wolfmother does one thing and does that one thing well. They rock. They're good at rocking. You know that Wolfmadre is around because they like to rock and they tend to at least not get too much stuff in the way of their rocking, and if they do have a little musical diversion here or there on their CD Wolfmother (self-titled) then they make sure that it is only there for the purpose of rocking you more. I guess I'll just refer to the first song Another Dimension where the guitar kind of CUTS OUT and the drums and bass sort of guide you along this fantasy world of four-necked x-guitars and demons and wizards and rocking leprechauns and shit, but its a good twist that flows well with the music. The Arcade Fire has a lot of good ideas for new sections, but it just comes off as sounding completely out of place and overly artsy. Of course, I'm primarily talking about one CD, Funeral, but I find this CD sort of representative of the things I don't like of their other songs, and for the band, as well. Also their other albums are EPs, right?????

That being said, Power Out (Neighboorhood #3) would be a great song if Win Butler's vocal slime didn't contanimnate every melodic line. Wake Up (Rebellion) is one of the few tracks I really dig on the album, as it kind of rocks but they get that sort of sensitive, throwing your depression medication down the toilet emotional feeling right too. Crown of Love, Haiti, Kettles, Laika, and Une Annee Sans Lumiere suck way too hard for me to consider TAF a good, or even consistent, band, or Funeral to be a good album.

But hey, Pitchfork knows what it's talking about, right?