March 6, 2007

Download "Black Mirror" by Arcade Fire*: .wma | .mp3

Ask music lovers, even the ardent byline-watchers among them, who David Moore is and they'll likely blank. Which is sort of too bad, considering that Moore wrote what increasingly looks like the most influential record review of the decade. If that designation sounds overheated, it fits the review's subject: the Arcade Fire, a new band from Montreal. The critique for their debut album, "Funeral," appeared on PitchforkMedia.com on Sept. 13, 2004, the day before its release. It wasn't the writing itself, though, that people went around quoting -- it was the rating given: 9.7 out of a possible perfect 10.

That an indie-rock Web site took so ardently and instantly to a new indie band wasn't itself news -- but the fact that Pitchfork's print rivals (Spin, Rolling Stone, Blender) hadn't yet caught the Arcade Fire's spark was. So were some other numbers inspired by Pitchfork's review: The album made it to No. 131 on the Billboard 200, the highest rank its label, the North Carolina indie Merge, had ever attained. The Arcade Fire became an overnight success: The manageable kind that indie rockers, who view a group such as Sonic Youth as the model for how to make it in the business without succumbing to the Biz, dream of.

What, exactly, does the Arcade Fire sound like? Imagine the Waterboys covering New Order and you're sort of there: a lot of instruments (at any given time the Arcade Fire plays, approximately 724 people are onstage, including occasional celebrity guests David Byrne and David Bowie, both vocal fans) over a nervous pulse accentuated by occasional double-hit snares.

Win Butler sings lead most of the time; he's occasionally spelled, and frequently backed up, by Régine Chassagne, to whom Butler is married. Both sound like they could use a hug. This is a lot of what draws their audience to them: The Arcade Fire is unafraid to be big and dramatic, and on their new release, "Neon Bible," they sound even bigger and more dramatic than on "Funeral." Their live show, always boisterous, received an extra push when Butler smashed his guitar during a recent performance on "Saturday Night Live."

If ambition is good, "drama" can be tedious, and both Arcade Fire albums are excellent examples why. On "Neon Bible," the strings that ascend like a spiral staircase in "Black Mirror" recast "Grease" as a campy horror-movie parody. "Keep the Car Running" aims to prove that the Hold Steady aren't the only indie-rock band who can rip off Bruce Springsteen. The lyrics are also plenty maudlin: "Don't want to fight in a holy war/I don't want the salesman knocking at my door" (from "Windowsill"), or "My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love" (from "My Body Is a Cage"). If you're 13, that might sound like life itself. If you're a few years older, you might ask yourself if it still does.

Still, the Arcade Fire's members seem to have kept their heads up in the face of the kind of scrutiny that threatens to fell some of the bands who've followed their footsteps. Pitchfork and blogger favorites Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's follow-up has garnered an almost universal indifference, for example. It makes sense, though. CYHSY and Tapes 'n Tapes seem to have stumbled upon their success accidentally; the Arcade Fire, on the other hand, was sonically gunning for the big time from jump. If they wind up the last of the Pitchfork bands standing, they probably would have done the same thing even without Moore's 9.7.

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Michaelangelo Matos is the author of "Sign 'O' the Times" (Continuum, 2004) and a freelance writer in Seattle.

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