Skip to main content

Arcade Fire :: Live 05.27.07 :: Portland, OR


THE ARCADE FIRE
27.05.2007 Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

The show opens with the fall of the house lights; the audience cheers and then becomes slightly restless as monitors flicker around the stage; grainy footage of a television evangelist, a hefty southern woman in sequins, paces breathlessly and decries “people pleasers” as “butt kissers” repeating over and over again that “we have no more time, no more time” and tells women to “take off those high heels”. She rushes back and forth whipping her crowd into a hallelujah frenzy, and then fades into static.

The band arrives, and it is immediately apparent that we are in church, and they are the evangelists. They immediately, with no banter, and no introductions, slam into “No Cars Go”; the audience, surging forward as Win invites “There’s plenty of room here at the front, come on down!” Security wrestles with the crowd, and manages to push them back, but not before a few people manage to make it to the space between the front row and the stage. There is a teenage boy held back by security, just to the right of us (we are third row); he has thrown himself against the security guard, just to get those few inches closer. He is punching the air , shaking his head, screaming “I love you Win, you’re beautiful!”; he is in ecstacy. He is the perfect portrait of a pentecostal worshipper, possessed by the spirit, lost in the bliss of his god.

The evangelical theme pervades the evening, with the monitors showing distorted black and white video feeds of the band playing, switching from angle to angle, looking not at all unlike a televised revival from the fifties or sixties. A pipe organ hangs from the beams, while the scrim is a colored projection of the Neon Bible itself. Regine Chassagne plays the perfect Tammy Faye to Win Butler’s Jim Bakker. She flounces, she pouts, she engages the audience, drawing us closer, gesturing to us to sing along, cupping her hands to her mouth on “Neighborhood #1(Tunnels)”, miming the chorus. The rest of the band are the gospel choir, singing along, shouting, making it clear to us that they may be creating something tonight, in this room, but they are experiencing it just as intensely as we.

They play all of the favorites, tightly, flawlessly; rushing around, changing instruments, their energy boundless, their enthusiasm contagious. Regine dances and preens her way coquettishly through “Haiti”, her be sequined Madonna gloves catching and reflecting the light as she dances tirelessly. After “Neon Bible”, they cover “Distortions” by Clinic, and, by the end of the song, the crowd is nearly silent. Someone shouts out and is shushed by someone elsewhere in the auditorium.“I picture you in coffin’s, my baby in a coffin/ i love it when you blink your eyes... I want to know no secrets here....free of distortions.”

Towards the end of the evening, Win thanks the crowd for coming, and segues into “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”, taking full advantage of the stage lighting, pulsing vertical bars of bright white light into the crowd. The crowd moves as a whole, fists punching the air, feet in constant motion, it seems that it may not be possible to be moved more than this moment... And then the band is jamming, slamming a crescendo onto the end of the song, and slowly, slowly, it becomes “Rebellion (Lies)”. The crowd pushes forward, again, fists in the air , punctuating the chorus of “Lies! Lies” and then Win Butler stepped off the stage.

He stumbled through the front, standing on whatever would support him; the crowd rushed to meet him, some briefly overpowering security. Win stepped over chairs, and climbed onto the back of an empty seat directly in front of us, standing not five inches away, continuing to sing, while we danced and punched the air, enraptured. He turned and headed back to the area in front of the stage where he was engulfed by fans who instead of overtaking him, supported him, helped him onto the back of a chair. Surrounded, he continued to sing, taking a camera pointed at him and turning it back on it’s owner, snapping off photos, singing into someone’s outreached cellular phone, surrounded by love, by bliss.

The atmosphere, by the end of the night, is that of pure ecstasy. My hands hurt from clapping, my throat aches from singing along, shouting, my arms ache from throwing them in the air, my feet from jumping, my legs from dancing. There was not a moment this night that we were still. I look from side to side, watching the crowd move, all of us held in place by our assigned seats. Here and there I see someone standing, arms folded, and all I can think is “How?”

editor's note: the photo above is from the prior night's show at the Sasquatch Music Fest, as we declined to take a camera into the Portland show (stupid!).

Arcade Fire/PDX, OR 5.27.07 "Distortions"


Arcade Fire/PDX, OR 5.27.07 "Rebellion (Lies)"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Celebrate Halloween with Peter Squires's New Video, "Witch"

I don't usually do festive or holiday posts. In fact, the closest I get is writing some kind of seasonal bent against a track, and only then when I've had too much coffee and can't find any relation to a song other than what the weather is doing. I just think holiday-themed posts / articles are lazy. But Halloween is different. Why? Because Halloween, to paraphrase Wesley Willis, whips a horse's ass. So when Ryan from The Musebox put me on to Peter Squires a few days ago, I knew it was going into the annals of Duck & Cover (that's right, I said "annals" on the Internets). From the Press Release: Peter’s direct and honest vocal delivery is reminiscent of contemporaries such as Kimya Dawson and Luke Temple. The album is all heart, laid bare for our aural pleasure. Woe Is Me was recorded in Peter Squires’ Brooklyn bedroom and is available on his website for fans to download at no charge. The first video from the album is “Witch” and it was just rele...

Lucero Video for "Darken My Door"

Darken My Door from Lucero on Vimeo . It's good to see that a serious band doesn't have to take itself seriously. Even better when a band's fans don't take them too seriously. "Darken My Door" off of Lucero's latest album, 1372 Overton Park , is a song about losing stuff--girlfriend, money, dignity. In fact, a lot of Lucero's songs are like that, but I'm not getting into that now. I'm talking about the video, which has so much to love. Obviously, I love the fact director Alex Mecum has used a puppet as the protagonist. But it's what the puppet does that makes this video so much fun. Puppet eating chili dogs, puppet drinking whiskey, puppet giving blow jobs . . . Hell, there's even puppet vomit! It's ridiculous, yes, but also tragic. By the end of the video, if you don't feel a little sorry for the scruffy faced whore puppet, then you have no soul. Here's a little more about the videos for Lucero's new album: To promot...

Flight of the Conchords Are Tha Muthaflippin'

If you go to the official Flight of the Conchords website , you will see that it was about the time they started work on their HBO special that they stopped updating. However, you will also read that they don’t mind too much. In fact, they are very quick to point to other fan sites that are doing a much better job. This self deprecating humour is part of what makes the duo so endearing. For those who have not yet seen the programme, Bret McKenzie ( formerly of Wellington dub band The Black Seeds) plays the naïve Bret, who is a vertible emotional rollercoaster when compared to the dour-faced Jermaine (Jermaine Clement. See him in Eagle vs. Shark ). Together they look for gigs and . . . well that’s pretty much it: they look for gigs. But it’s enough. Just because the show’s premise isn’t robust, doesn’t mean the show falls flat. Hell, remember Seinfeld? That was a show supposedly about ‘nothing,’ and look how well it did. FOTC is at least about one thing, so it’s got that much more ...