For a band as careful about its textures as Arcade Fire is, choosing to perform in Judson Memorial Church was a mistake.
Testing Faith in a Church
On Tuesday night, when the Montreal band Arcade Fire started its sold-out five-night stand at the Judson Memorial Church, an audience member shouted, “Why a church?” Win Butler, the band’s leader and main singer, dodged the question. But the obvious answer is the band’s second full album, due March 6. It’s called “Neon Bible” (Merge) and has songs about impending apocalypse, fear and faith.
Regine Chassagne of Arcade Fire. The Montreal band is playing five sold-out shows through Saturday at the Judson Memorial Church.
“Funeral” (Merge), Arcade Fire’s 2004 debut album, introduced a band that thinks big, musically and verbally. Its songs are rooted in New Wave rock but have no fear of bombast. Songs like “Haiti,” from 2004, or “No Cars Go,” which appears on both Arcade Fire’s early self-titled EP and on “Neon Bible,” are upbeat, homemade anthems that pile on instruments — accordion, glockenspiel, Moog, hurdy-gurdy — and rise to group singalongs and wordless pop choruses. The lyrics meanwhile draw grand lessons from everyday life. Arcade Fire quickly, and deservedly, became an indie-rock sensation.
“Funeral” found comfort and community in the face of death. Three years later “Neon Bible” is even more confident but considerably bleaker. Family and religion no longer provide any sure refuge. “I’m living in an age that calls darkness light,” Mr. Butler sang in “My Body Is a Cage,” a stark Appalachian-tinged ballad. The song began with his quavery tenor voice exposed above hymnlike chords, then took on pomp and heft as he implored, “Set my spirit free.”
In Arcade Fire’s newer songs the music sometimes veers toward minor harmonies, and the drumbeats hint at relentlessness as well as vigor. Mr. Butler, originally from Texas, sings dire political and personal tidings: “Don’t wanna fight in a holy war/Don’t want the salesmen knocking at my door,” he sang in “Windowsill,” getting applause as he continued, “I don’t wanna live in America no more.”
The band onstage included two French horns and two violins, building arrangements toward the orchestral. Yet even when the music sounded triumphal, as it did in “Intervention” — with pipe-organ chords, a martial beat and horns suggesting fanfares — the words said otherwise: “Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home/Hear the soldier groan, ‘We’ll go at it alone.’ ”
Not that it was easy to make them out. A better audience question might have been “Why the Judson Church?” — an elegant space with a long artistic history and awful acoustics for a 10-piece, full-tilt rock band. In the bass-heavy room, the drums just about steamrolled the voices and upper-register instruments. For a band as careful about its textures as Arcade Fire is, choosing the church was a mistake.
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