music : Arcade Fire

I'm giving a retroactive 2004 Song of the Year award to Wake Up by the Arcade Fire. I was a little late to the AF party, arriving via their Toronto buddies Wolf Parade and their fabulous album Apologies to the Queen Mary.

James tried turning me on to them when they were still au courant with the hipsterati, but at the time I eyed his recommendations with profound suspicion (I still have a hangover from his enthusiastic low-fi indy garage rock period, when his only criteria for greatness seemed to be off-key vocals and Radio Shack portable cassette recorder fidelity).

Well, he was right, they're great.
I hereby officially forgive him for making me listen to Sparklehorse.

And they're great in a way you don't see very often in modern music. They manage the neat trick of wearing their hearts on their sleeves without coming off as corny saps, and their best songs simultaneously convey the tragedy, wonder and majesty of life without collapsing beneath the immense load, or even seeming to take the responsibility all that seriously. There wasn't any great conscious struggle to form it just so, that's just how the song turned out.

Wake Up is different from most other songs I'm mad for because I listened to Funeral several times before I noticed how fantastic it was.

Usually a song that moves me and gives me chills does it right off the bat- the first five seconds of Wolf Parade's I'll Believe In Anything made my hair stand on end the first time I heard it (and every listen since).

I think it's because the album version of Wake Up is a bit vocally muted. But I loved the album and as is my habit with bands I love I tracked down all the live performances I could find- I got wonderful copy of a show they did for a public radio station in Minnesota.

That performance of Wake Up absolutely set me on fire. It was ragged and gorgeous and had a depth of feeling that's almost never captured in a recording. I'm lucky I wasn't in that audience, it likely would have killed me.

(oddly, the studio recording of I'll Believe in Anything is much superior to any others I've heard...I have a couple of live verisions & it loses much of it's relentlessly epic quality. Kudos to their producer for nailing the soul of the song in the studio.)

Anyway, here's a good live version of Wake Up I found on Youtube, with David Bowie lending a hand (which is sure to send the wife into conniptions when I show it to her.)

check it.

/edit
ok got home and checked out the clip with speakers- really good, nice to see the industry crowd get swept away.

but this one is better. Better mix (strings to the front), and as much as I love Bowie nobody else does these lyrics justice.