Features
Friday, February 18 2011
The Myth of The Suburbs Vs. The Reality of the Suburbs
The Arcade Fire's The Suburbs may win Grammys and top year-end lists, but it also perpetuates shallow and uninformed beliefs about its central subject matter.
Friday, December 24 2010
The 70 Best Albums of 2010
PopMatters is on its annual publishing break until 3 January 2011, except for some film reviews and blogs. In the meantime, enjoy some of the year's best...
The year's best albums are highlighted by the emergence of a future superstar, two veteran and virtuoso rappers, and a Dream Team of indie bands releasing career peaks.
Friday, December 24 2010
The 60 Best Songs of 2010
Sixty slices of musical greatness highlighted by one of the most delightful expletive-ridden hits in pop music history.
Thursday, December 16 2010
The Best Fantastical Music of 2010
The more you look, the more examples of the fantastic you find in music this year.
Monday, August 11 2008
Arcade Fire and H.G. Wells: The Lies Machine
Pop music may still travel in revolutions, but not along a fixed course maintaining an even degree of distance from its point of origin. Like a moon intolerant of its gravitation pull, each cycle drifts us further and further from the cycle before it.
Reviews
Tuesday, August 2 2011
Arcade Fire: The Suburbs (Deluxe Edition)
Inspiring everything from undying adulation to knee-jerk backlash, it's the wide array of responses The Suburbs has elicited that offers the greatest testament to how vital it remains.
Wednesday, June 29 2011
Arcade Fire: 8 June 2011 - Charlottesville, Virginia
Performances like this one might tell us as much about the band's future as it does about its past.
Monday, August 2 2010
Arcade Fire: The Suburbs
Although there are a few moments on the album that do interestingly juxtapose idyllic, more fondly remembered suburban scenes with soul-deadening ones, too much time is spent lingering in inescapability and spiritual darkness.
Friday, May 1 2009
Arcade Fire: Miroir Noir: Neon Bible Archives [DVD]
Miroir Noir is a self-aware tone-poem essay on the Arcade Fire's navigation of the post-millennial liminal spaces between commercial capitalism and independent art.
Thursday, January 31 2008
Arcade Fire + Spoon
An army of roadies buzzed about the stage, assembling a clavichord here, a glockenspiel there, plus several mic stands with loudspeakers perched at the tops. Whatever we were about to see, it was obvious that it was going to be big.
Blogs
Friday, October 28 2011
Austin City Limits: Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr + Fleet Foxes + Arcade Fire
When you get right down to it, very few bands are truly capable of commanding a festival size crowd and won't be getting any easier, as attention spans get ever shorter.
Friday, May 20 2011
Counterbalance No. 34: The Arcade Fire’s 'Funeral'
Jason Mendelsohn and Eric Klinger got into a fight so that the neighbors could dance in the police disco lights. But since disco is passé, no one showed up. This week in Counterbalance, the Arcade Fire's Funeral.
Wednesday, September 1 2010
The Drums Cover Arcade Fire's "We Used to Wait" and Release New Video (MP3 / video)
The Drums recently stopped by the BBC to perform at the BBC Three Live Lounge and they did a live take of "We Used to…
Thursday, August 26 2010
Raze It to the Ground: Arcade Fire’s Urban Bias
Throughout 'The Suburbs', Arcade Fire seems completely ill-equipped to understand both where it came from and, more pressingly, where it is now. That kind of tunnel vision is what leads the band to articulate such an uncritical urban bias.
Wednesday, August 18 2010
It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Mach Schau
Call it "mach schau", soul, or the “swing” without which Duke Ellington warns us “it don’t mean a thing”, the physically felt component of live performance is perhaps easiest defined, if not in its absence, then in its failed attempt.
News
Wednesday, April 20 2011
Surprise Grammy win hasn't changed Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire, fresh off one of the most shocking Grammy wins of all time, is touring middle America. Drummer Jeremy Gara talked about the rising…
Tuesday, October 2 2007
Talking 'Bible' with the Arcade Fire
Five months after the Arcade Fire issued its second album, "Neon Bible," the dramatic Canadian ensemble has cemented itself as one of rock's most vital…
Tuesday, March 6 2007
Arcade Fire can't rein in its ambition
Maybe all I need to convince me of its wondrousness is a memorable experience at Coachella. That's what it took for Funeral to stick, after all.
