Arcade Fire

THE ARCADE FIRE -- NEON BIBLE

The Arcade Fire spent most of 2006 holed up in a small church in a small town outside of Montreal. They were recording their second album NEON BIBLE. It was a slow year, mostly.

The couple years before that had been rather hectic. Funeral, their first album, was released in September of 2004. The moment it came out, the Arcade Fire were caught up in a flurry of activity that left none dead but several wounded. A lot of people liked Funeral a lot. Reviews were insanely positive, from local Montreal press to New York Times feature articles.

Shows, too, were selling out. In 2004, the Arcade Fire were playing small venues packed to the gills with 100, maybe 200 people. After Funeral came out, the size of the shows slowly crept up. A lot of people liked the shows a lot. You could probably argue that the live show was better than the record. Don’t get me wrong, the record was really good. But so too was the live show. By the end of 2005, the Arcade Fire were playing largish venues packed to the gills with thousands of people, in shows that had sold out in ridiculously short amounts of time. This all was a little overwhelming. Nice, but weird.

Nice but weird things happened to the Arcade Fire all of 2005. They played a Talking Heads song with David Byrne at one of their shows, and then got to open for him at the Hollywood Bowl. They got to perform with David Bowie, both in concert and on national TV. They got to go to Japan and Sweden and Brazil. They got to perform a very poorly rehearsed version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart (Again)” with U2. So all in all, by the time the year ended, the Arcade Fire were pretty damn tired. Happy and satisfied, yes, but really tired.

Coming off a year of intense touring, they wanted to just sit down and write some songs. And then record them. So they found a church out in a small town and turned it into a studio. They moved in all their amps and instruments, bought some nice curtains, stocked the fridge, and hunkered down. They were in no rush.

They knew they were working on an album, but didn’t know how long it would be, or what it would be called, or what songs would be on it, or what instruments would be on the songs. They knew they would produce it themselves, though—they had too many musical plans pent up in their brains to hand control over to someone else. So they found some grand engineers to make those musical plans reality—Markus Dravs (Bjork, James, Brian Eno) and Scott Colburn (Sun City Girls, Animal Collective).

Slowly the songs came together. They found a huge pipe organ in a huge church in Montreal and recorded it. They bought some bass steel drums and some bass synths. They got a hurdy-gurdy. They called in friends for help: Martin Wenk and Jacob Valenzuela, the horn players from Calexico, came in for a song. Hadjii Bakara from Wolf Parade added some bleep and bloops and sonic weirdness. Owen Pallett, aka Final Fantasy, helped to orchestrate (as he did on Funeral). Pietro Amato and his horn playing associates added some brass. The band traveled to Budapest to record an orchestra and a military choir. And besides all this, the band just played music together. They played the songs that were going on the album. They played songs that wouldn’t go on the album. They played cover songs. It was all quite nice, really.

All this took about a year. The band worked and played and worked, and as Christmas 2006 approached the recording was finished. NEON BIBLE was full of both half-assed punk rock mistakes and meticulously orchestrated woodwinds. Processed strings and mandolin. Quiet rumbles and loud rumbles. But mostly just eleven songs that the band thinks are really good. And that might be of some public interest. So, on with 2007.

For more information, call toll free 1-866-NEON BIBLE, or visit www.neonbible.com

Régine Chassagne, Richard Parry, Tim Kingsbury, and brothers Win Butler and William Butler comprise the Arcade Fire, an experimental indie rock outfit hailing from the musical hotbed of Montreal. The five-piece band formed in the summer of 2003, after Butler spotted Chassagne singing jazz standards at a local art exhibit at Concordia University. The two quickly became inseparable, both professionally and personally, and gathered Parry on organ, Kingsbury on bass, and Win Butler's younger brother William on synthesizer and percussion to form the Arcade Fire -- the band fleshed out an eclectic mix of bossa nova, punk, and classically tinged songs, drawing upon everything from U2's passion to David Bowie's eclecticism in the process. A self-titled EP appeared in 2003, and the Arcade Fire signed with Merge Records and prepped for their first studio album that same year. Win Butler and Régine Chassagne were married in August, but tragedies nevertheless plagued the band, including the deaths of Chassagne's grandmother, the Butlers' grandfather (swing-era composer/arranger Alvino Rey), and Parry's aunt. The band persevered, and its debut album, Funeral, arrived in September 2004. The record was met with unanimous acclaim -- both commercially and critically -- and the Arcade Fire extended their resulting tour into 2005, playing such high-profile festivals as Lollapalooza and Coachella while touring the world, appearing on the cover of Time magazine's Canadian edition, and garnering a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. Following an exhausting year, the Arcade Fire decamped to a church outside of Montreal to work on a second release. The ambitious Neon Bible arrived in March 2007, featuring such grand ornamentations as a pipe organ, a military choir, and a full orchestra. ~ Andrew Leahey & MacKenzie Wilson, All Music Guide