The Arcade Fire (again)

Music: In the backseat by The Arcade Fire

So I'm in the movie theater seeing the 12 pm showing of A Clockword Orange when James pulls a full beer out of his pocket and opens it, fizz spilling all over the floor. I look to Cooper and rhetorically ask "He probably shouldn't be doing that, right?" Cooper just calmly looks at me and says "You know, I tell him not to do things and he doesn't listen and it just stresses me out, so... whatever." The movie goes on. Fucked up movie; I've seen it before, but it's still weird every time I see it. There's a part where the main character is forced to undergo a radical treatment as part of his debt to society which involves a group of scientists making him deathly sick with a drug while forcing him to watch scenes of violence in hopes of making his body associate the sickness with violence and prevent him from being able to be violent without becoming deathly ill. On the trip back to the dorms, James is littering all over the place and Cooper threatens him with the prospect of making him sick while forcing him to watch videos of people littering. Then I pushed Ora down a dark alley. Good times.

So yeah, Arcade Fire concert Thursday at the Roxy. It was amazing. The first opening band, One AM Radio, was like mixing Incubus with Dispatch and cranking the "boring" to 1000. Final Fantasy was a one-man show where he started off with a simple violin melody then recorded it and looped it and started on a more complex melody to build atop the other one, and so forth. It was cool in that he controlled it all with his feet and would just build the song up without any breaks and then stop it all at once at the end. Not the most enthralling performance ever, but certainly interesting. The Arcade Fire was simply awesome. They are such a good live band. Besides the drummer, they all stand equal length from the end of the stage so it's just a line of performers. They all seem to sing and scream throughout the songs, no matter what they are doing. The random percussion guy (who looks like Napoleon Dynamite) was great, finding different things around the stage to bang on the whole time. The violinist and the Final Fantasy guy (who was a guest backup-violinist apparently) chased each other around and seemed to have a thing going. Regine, who switched between keyboard, drums, accordion, and just singing, has a haunting beauty about her, and does the "happy hands" thing or whatever it's called from Napoleon Dynamite when she sings. They did every song on their album, plus a cover, a new song, and a few from their old EP (which I picked up at the show and therefore didn't have to buy on eBay at exorbant prices). It's always great seeing a band you really like live, you get an impression of them you just can't get from a CD. I was surprised at how friendly and outgoing they were. Not that that's bad, but it was hard not to get a larger-than-life impression of them. Similar bands are usually a little over-the-top, like Interpol who barely say a word to the audience, just do their songs and get off the stage, and always dress up in semi-creepy suits; one member constantly wears a gun holster for christ's sake. Not them though, they were joking around and having a jolly time. Win was joking about living in a mansion and Regine, his wife, just rolled her eyes.

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Alice died
in the night
I've been learning to drive
my whole life
I've been learning