Posted March 5, 200718 yr Well this excellent album is out TOMMOZY. Should chart highly methinks :D Tis :wub: So what are people's thoughts :o?
March 5, 200718 yr I've bought it today & have been playing it all evening. I adored Funeral, but Neon Bible is even better. Black Mirror, Intervention, Windowsill, No Cars Go & My Body Is A Cage are classics. It has the potential to be this decade's OK Computer. Forget RHCP, U2, Coldplay, Muse, Snow Patrol or Radiohead.... Arcade Fire are the greatest Rock band around at the moment.
March 6, 200718 yr I certainly agree with that last statement! It's not grown on me loads yet but I know they're all excellent. They just need a while to get into. I doubt I'll ever like anything as much as Funeral but this should come mighty close! I'm hoping it'll be number one this week.
March 6, 200718 yr Says the person who states OASIS as being their favourite band. :smoke: Oh touché bitch :kink:
March 8, 200718 yr AllMusic Guide Review: Review by James Christopher Monger 5 Stars When Montreal's Arcade Fire released Funeral in 2004, it received the kind of critical and commercial acclaim that most bands spend their entire careers trying to attain. Within a year the group was headlining major festivals and sharing the stage with U2 and New York City's "two Davids" (Bowie and Byrne), all the while amassing a devoted following that descended upon shows like sinners at a tent revival, engaging in the kind of artist appreciation that can easily turn to a false sense of ownership. On their alternately wrecked and defiant follow-up, Neon Bible, one can sense a bit of a Wall being erected (Win Butler's Roger Waters/Bruce Springsteen/Garrison Keillor-style vocal delivery notwithstanding) around the group. If Funeral was the goodbye kiss on the coffin of youth, then Bible is the bitter pint (or pints) after a long day's work. The brooding opener, "Black Mirror," with its sinister "Suffragette City"-inspired groove and murky refrain of "Mirror, Mirror on the wall/Show me where them bombs will fall," sets an immediate world-weary tone that permeates that majority of Neon Bible's Technicolor pages. As expected, those sentiments are amplified with all of the majestic and overwrought power that has divided listeners since the group's ascension to indie rock royalty, but despite a tendency toward midtempo balladry and post-fame cynicism, they're anything but dull. It's the triumphant orchestral remake of live staple "No Cars Go" and the infectious "Keep the Car Running" — the latter sounds like a 21st century update of John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band's "On the Dark Side" — that will most appeal to Funeral fans, and when the bottom drops out a minute and a half into the pipe organ-led "Intervention" and Butler wails "Who's gonna reset the bone," it's hard not get caught up in all of the dystopian fervor. "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations" and "The Well and the Lighthouse" continue the band's explorations into progressive song structures and lush mini-suites, the thunder-filled "Ocean of Noise" is reminiscent of Bossanova-era Pixies, and the stark (at first) closer "My Body Is a Cage" straddles the sawhorse of earnest desperation and classic rock & roll self-absorption so effortlessly that it demands to be either turned off or all the way up. Neon Bible takes a few spins to digest properly, and like all rich foods (orchestra, harps, and gospel choirs abound), it's as decadent as it is tasty — theatricality has never been a practice that the collective has shied away from — but there's no denying the Arcade Fire's singular vision, even when it blurs a little.
March 8, 200718 yr Rolling Stone magazine review: DAVID FRICKE 3.5 Stars (Posted: Feb 20, 2007) The key to all that is right, weird and nobly flawed about Arcade Fire's second album is in the next-to-last song, "No Cars Go." Written by the Montreal band's founding singers, Win Butler and his wife, Regine Chassagne, "No Cars Go" -- a teens-on-the-lam anthem about starting a new Eden, out where there are no roads -- first appeared on Arcade Fire, a self-released 2003 EP. On that record, the song was a midtempo run wrapped in what sounded like a couple of old accordions the group found gathering dust in an abandoned wilderness cabin. The version on Neon Bible shows the difference a bigger production budget and a quantum leap in fear, everywhere you turn, can make. The basics remain: the simple, infectious melody; the singing-telegram lyrics ("Us kids know/ No cars go. . . . Hey!"). But the song now takes off like an army of Harleys on a dirt track (drummer Jeremy Gara's accents jolt the rhythm like potholes), and the arrangement is atomic melodrama -- strings, brass and refugee-choir vocals ringing in Grand Canyon-like echo. Like almost everything on Neon Bible, the follow-up to Arcade Fire's 2004 full-length debut, Funeral, "No Cars Go" is excess with a point: We are drowning in the unspeakable and running out of air and fight. If only everything else on Neon Bible made that point with the same dynamic overkill. It's strange enough that Arcade Fire chose to cover themselves after just two records. It's stranger still that such a big band -- now seven members, playing a symphony's worth of instruments among them -- can sound so distant here so often. The reverb on Funeral was distinct but restrained, coating Arcade Fire's rousing, Balkan-dance-band jump in an early-Eighties New Wave atmosphere that perfectly suited Butler's neo-operatic tenor. If Echo and the Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch is looking for a long-lost twin brother, he can start looking in Quebec. But on Neon Bible, the reverb is so big and black that the beat becomes boom and the orchestral garnish, arranged by Chassagne and Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett, gets pressed to the margins. The result is a huge sound that only sparkles on the edges, leaving Butler alone in the middle, railing against rising tides, falling bombs and the nonstop rain of $h!t on television like he's singing from the pulpit of an empty cathedral. Maybe that was the idea. Neon Bible is an aggressively gothic record, explicitly so in the pipe organ that soars over the hunger and wreckage in "Intervention." More intriguing are "Black Mirror" and "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations," which somehow combine the oppressive dread on Side Two of David Bowie's Low with the church-bells-in-the-rain reveille of U2's Boy. "Neon Bible" is even bleaker, a soft two-minute eulogy for a generation blinded by chain-store signs and laptop-computer glow. "A vial of hope and a vial of pain/In the light, they both looked the same," Butler sings through whispering cellos and child-angel harmonies, like Leonard Cohen wandering through the third Velvet Underground album. But there is determined resistance here too, a twisted faith in escape that comes through best when Arcade Fire hit the gas pedal. "Keep the Car Running" is a gripping chase scene -- Butler on the run from some kind of gestapo -- with crisply strummed mandolins and a racing pulse. Even better is the wordy delirium of "(Anti- christ Television Blues)." The reverb does the lyrics no favors, obscuring big chunks of the thirteen verses. But at the end of this torrent of 9/11 trauma ("The planes keep crashing, always two by two") and blasphemous prayer (a minimum-wage-slave dad asks God to make his daughter a TV star), an avenging spirit cuts through -- "I'm through being cute," Butler snaps, "I'm through being nice" -- that runs deep in Neon Bible. It's too bad you can't always hear it.
March 8, 200718 yr Arcade Fire Neon Bible (Sonovox) **** While Montreal's ludicrously hip Arcade Fire may be undone by the inevitable backlash, their bubble isn't ready for bursting just yet. This second album is brimming with ideas, some of them silly (the pointlessly pared down Antichrist Television Blues), but most of them inspired, not least the fabulous Intervention, which is probably the track of their lives. Beginning with Bach-esque keyboards, it soars into a modern-day hymn of despair and redemption - with, literally, bells on - which is as exhilarating as it is exhausting. Nothing quite matches that, although the bass on Ocean of Noise and a radical reworking of their 2003 track No Cars Go come close. JOHN AIZLEWOOD (ThisisLondon.co.uk)
March 10, 200718 yr Have to say i've recently got into them, i've been listening to the album tonight and it really is a goodie!! Good to see them on course for No.1 on sunday.
March 13, 200718 yr Butler sings through whispering cellos and child-angel harmonies, like Leonard Cohen wandering through the third Velvet Underground album. and if you like them, keep your eye out on the culture box!!!
April 6, 200718 yr I love the album and the band in general. Intervention, Black Mirror, My Body is a Cage and No Cars Go are all amazing tracks to say the very least.
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