Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

I've got to throw in my flip two cents about the new Arcade Fire. It's already passed two tests

-driving. If a record makes you a) slow down and check out the scenery & helps you blend that scenery with whatever's on your mind/soul with the music you're experiencing into some entirely new momentary perspective on life and living or b) speed up past 100k & just drive, then it's got its flying colors.

-the hood test. While not in motion, and while living where I am now, I'll often pull the intake hood out over my gas stove, which activates the noisy updraft system and dilutes the perception of music down to its core beat & melody. Add the smoking of cigarettes/and/or other inhalables, which is, in fact the reason I spend so much time in this little location, and you've got a unique perspective on all sorts of sound, & helps deliniate that primal musical trigger, free of any intellectual obfuscation that's present whilst listening to every little lyric & musical nuance.

In passing those tests it's got past the first impressions stage. While the previous album, Funeral, was alot more of a visceral, first-impressions trip, that allowed you in to its enlightenments afterwards, Neon Bible seems to work the other way around. There's something more intellectually angst-y about the subject matter here, and when I'm talking angst I mean of the more rarified variety that found on your average emo record- in no way do I wish to equate this band with that 'movement'. There's genuine anger here, and darkness, things you don't often find in records that debut at no. 2 on the Billboard chart. For that matter, things you haven't found on this band's past recordings- on Funeral the sense was that someone has come through a crisis, and was singing of the enlightenments & complications generated by that. Neon Bible seems to me in the midst of a crisis, half on the way to enlightenment & not sure if it's getting there or is ever going to. But all this boils down to the fact that when you release an all-around revealtion of a first major record, anything that follows is going to seem dimmed, no matter how you look at it. I choose not to look at it from a common perspective, which is to infer that a successful 'new' band's sophomore album is going to be more jaded following their exposure to a much more demanding and complicated world than they were living in while recording their first innocent little record ( I always think of the poor old Counting Crows here, who releleased a marvellous, trillion-selling first album of individual vision, and followed it up with one of expanded musical innovation, but concerned lyrically with dating TV stars and the mind-fuck of hearing your songs all over the radio- transposing your personal experience into universality doesn't go so well when you're living a life like that all of a sudden).
No, I'd rather live with this record for a while. That's the best first impression it can give- that you want to continue a relationship with it. I'm surprised in my reaction to the urgency of this album- when Funeral was Everywhere I was, though I didn't realize it, surrounding myself with 'apocolyptic' music & living in a wasteland of industry, driving through miles of strip-mall & gas-station nastiness to work every day and listening to things like Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. So now that I'm here in pastoral la-la land countryside, maybe it just doesn't jive with my personal sensibility at the moment. Funeral cut through all that apololypto jive, so by that rationale the worldly urgeny of Neon Bible should equally augment my chilled-out country bliss.

See- at the heart it's all about the individual, right? I actually had the pleasure of meeting Win Butler and Regine Chassange of this band early last year, in a casual, non-public way, and that introduces a whole other dimension to the digestion of an artist's work. The beginning of my respect for an artist I've met or know personally arises when I find myself asking one key question-- where in the hell does their work come from? If one can read this immediately, or heaven forbid if you are told directly by the artist, it all ends there.
Today I was reading a Rolling Stone article (issue 1008, September 7, 2006, Bob Dylan cover) about this purported psychedelic guru, operataing out of NYC and espousing the use of psychotropics as a necessary way of getting to the heart of existance in a world rapidly on its way to (natch) the apocalypse. He's gone to many and varied lengths to espouse this method, writing books, setting himself up as a public figure, but at the heart of it, and this was perhaps the thesis point of the article, it all boiled down to the transparency of his needs as a simple human, needs borne out of a childhood and adolesence filled with hurt & rejection. His ideas, and the very fact that he is attempting to gain such widespread recognition for them, are undermined by his very vulnerable human-ness.
Now an artist who can transpose this vulnerability and generate something entirely new deflects this transparency. In fact in many cases deflecting this transparency is the very prime motivation of an artist, even if it involves singing diary-entry songs to a roomful of kindred spirits. But of main interest to me is that moment where you realize someone has transformed one thing into another, be it a feeling, an idea, or anything else born of themselves and forged in some crucible of the artist's mind & ability that maybe thay can't even fully explain, something that drops off from their own ego and becomes something new. It's like watching a cell divide. That's the ground zero of the true artistic experience, & there are few things I love more than realizing this has happened, and someone has moved into that realm where all of a sudden that person standing next to you has taken on all sorts of mystery and depth of the kind only generated by a true artist.