The Fire This Time (part one)
Source: By MICHAEL BARCLAY
Posted: 05/14/07 2:03PM
Filed Under: Music
In a tiny church, in a tiny town in Quebec's rural Eastern Townships, an international conglomerate is laying a foundation for world domination: there's the Canadian and American musicians prepping for rehearsal, the German engineer pushing buttons in the background, the British manager who flew in yesterday and the New York City-based tour manager who will arrive in a few hours.
The kitchen table is a hive of activity: furious typing on no less than four laptops and endless cellphone chatter competing with the rock 'n' roll ruckus starting inside the chapel, which was converted into a recording studio and living quarters a year earlier.
As more of the extended family arrive at the church--11 band members in total, three management staff, three tech crew, one girlfriend just off the plane from Saskatchewan, and this journalist--it becomes apparent that a circus is taking shape. "I'm just realizing now that this is what it's going to be like every night for the next year," sighs multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry, his voice imbued with both excitement and pre-emptive exhaustion.
Arcade Fire--whose new album, 'Neon Bible,' is released today--don't expect to conquer the world, even if everyone else around them is intent on it. The Montreal band's 2004 debut, 'Funeral,' sold three-quarters of a million copies on an independent label, mostly through word of mouth and the strength of the live show. But as of this mid-January rehearsal, they haven't played live in 14 months, when they threatened to upstage U2 while opening two sold-out shows in their hometown hockey arena.
A precious few have heard the new material at this point, and the outside world is dying to know what's been happening for the past year inside this church, where the band has been sequestered out of the public eye: renovating, writing and recording.
In many ways, the band itself is just as curious about what they've created. At the first rehearsals just before Christmas, they were slightly terrified that they didn't know how to play their new material in concert. "None of these songs have really been played live, with a couple of exceptions," says Parry. "With 'Funeral,' it was: play it live, record a couple of songs, write some new songs, play them live, record some more. Now it's a whole new everything-at-once."
Though they're nervous, there's nary a sign of tentative caution as they run through the new set, altering tempos and fooling around with newly acquired megaphones, which are employed for many of the backing vocals. The only serious glitch is the constantly crashing laptop they bought for the sole purpose of booting up a pipe organ sample, central to the new songs 'Intervention' and 'My Body is a Cage.' Auxiliary members Owen Pallett (of Polaris Prize-winner Final Fantasy) and Pietro Amato (Torngat) are there to teach the string and french horn parts to their new replacements, before disappearing with their own projects after these warm-up shows.
There's a slight tension in the air, because everyone here knows that 'Neon Bible' is one of the most-anticipated albums of 2007. That might be daunting for most bands, but exceeding expectations has been Arcade Fire's ace card from the moment 'Funeral' arrived; it actually went out of print in its second week of release, sparking a scramble at the pressing plant. Spawned from a crushingly cynical indie rock scene, these uplifting Montrealers (some by way of Houston) were instantly beloved and easily crossed over into the mainstream, inspiring earnest hyperbole from every corner of the world, including music icons like Bono and Davids Bowie and Byrne.
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