"We Used to Wait" by The Arcade Fire

This creative video of the song "We Used to Wait" by The Arcade Fire is awesome, but the song itself is even awesomer! (Is "awesomer" a word? I declare it to be a word.) At the official website of the video, you can apparently (using Google Chrome) interact in some ways with the video -- I haven't tried that yet. Watch the video regardless, and use full screen and as high a resolution as you can -- there are a lot of little things going on here. And if you don't yet have the latest CD called The Suburbs by The Arcade Fire, get it now!

Arcade Fire - We Used To Wait (The Wilderness Downtown full experiment - HD 1080p) (YouTube)

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h/t Joe Jervis

Coming Soon!

My story "Flying Fox" will go up at The Piker Press on August 9!






The Arcade Fire has a new CD coming out on August 3, entitled The Suburbs.

Don't let any opera singers cover these tunes, okay?

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Hopeless

The Arcade Fire -- the real deal. Accept no substitutes.

Oh my FSM. This classical music blogger sums it up perfectly. A marvelous analysis of everything that is wrong with Renée Fleming’s new CD, Dark Hope.

The same mistakes are repeated all over the record – Band of Horses’ sparse ballad “No One’s Gonna Love You” is transformed into a half-hearted syrupy mess. Willy Mason’s naïve “Oxygen” becomes overworked with the addition of synthesized strings.

What do you think would happen if you tried to put these strings on one of Renée’s classical albums? How is it ok here? Is there a good reason to accept lower standards because it’s a rock record?

No, there is no good reason, and that’s what forms the glaring fault at the heart of this project. Compliments for Renée’s voice, but what the hell were they thinking with these arrangements? They’re timid and totally without character. As with any other cover of a song, the artist has to have a point in doing it in the first place – what are you trying to say that wasn’t said in the original? Somebody grabbed some indie tunes for Renée to sing and did nothing to make her versions count. Coming on the heels of what I consider one of Renée Fleming’s finest CDs (Verismo), Dark Hope is just embarrassing. The bright hope is that they won’t try this again.

“A hope in the dark: Renée Fleming’s rock album” (Proper Discord)

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Renée Fleming's Dark Hope

I finally found a chance to listen to Renée Fleming's new CD, Dark Hope. My opinion is divided. Renée's voice is perfect on this disc, both bluesy and beautiful in all the right ways and far surpassing her run at jazz and soft pop on her CD Haunted Heart, which wasn't bad at all. But she has found a better and more substantial voice for pop/rock music here. The Renée Fleming fan in me is very, very happy.

However, the arrangements of the songs on Dark Hope are a little too MOR for my taste -- the rock fan in me wants more energy and aggression. My keystone song on the CD is "Intervention," originally done by The Arcade Fire on their CD, Neon Bible. This is an angry song with huge operatic themes and emotions (see the video, which is well-accompanied by clips from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin). Ironically, in the hands of the greatest active operatic soprano, this arrangement of "Intervention" fails to reach those emotional heights.

Renée Fleming, with that perfect voice, would be better served with more aggressive arrangements of all of these songs -- her delivery of the Letter Scene in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin has more emotional heft to it. So, my feelings about this CD are mixed. A missed opportunity in many ways. Renée delivered, but perhaps the fears of the producers kept the balance of the songs' imprint a bit too tame. Damn, this CD had the potential to be great.



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