Wednesday morning I got an email re: Seattle press inquiry. It was a notification that my photo pass and ticket would be waiting at will call and that “AF” would be playing at 8:45.
AF? Who was I seeing with the initials “AF?”
Arcade Fire? Wait, what? You see, I requested to shoot Arcade Fire about three weeks ago, on the off chance that I’d get it. But I never heard back so I forgot about trying, and I wasn’t about to spend $40 on a ticket when I’m a poor college student. So when I got the confirmation email, I literally started screaming in my car at the stop light on my way to school.
That night I drove to Seattle for the fourth time in a week to see the Canadian geniuses that they are, and let me tell you, I’m so darned glad I got that confirmation email.
Arcade Fire played at the Key Arena that night, which is the largest indoor venue in the area, and they took full advantage of the ginormous room. With eight people in the band running around the stage and breaking instruments matched with a mesmerizing visual the background reminiscent of old home movies, the show managed to be intimate even with the thousands of people filling the seats.
To begin their awe-inspiring 90-minute set, the band appropriately jumped right into “Ready to Start,” perhaps the best song off their new album The Suburbs, and I could feel the energy from the small circle of the diehard fans right behind me as I maneuvered around my friends in this narrow pit between the stage and crowd barrier. At the end of the second song “Month of May,” I heard some guy behind me scream “MAY IS NOW MY FAVORITE MONTH!” Good for you, dude.
Keeping the energy up, next we got the driving force of “Keep The Car Running” off Neon Bible. Really, you’ll be hard up to find another band from this last decade with a catalogue as impressive as Arcade Fire. The brilliance of the songs along with the fact that the stage was literally filled with the eight musicians in Arcade Fire made it a truly memorable performance. It would be easy to clutter the stage with that many performers, but the Arcade Fire have this fantastic formula for music with all the band members as variables, and it always equals awesome.
A couple of my favourite moments of the night came when Regine Chassagne took the mic during “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” and “Haiti,” her French/English lament about her birthplace. In fact, at the end of the show, Butler told the audience that a dollar of every ticket went to Haiti relief efforts.
The crowd on the other hand, kind of sucked. As I couldn’t linger right up front the entire time, once I found where my ticket had placed me, I danced at my seat, along with a few other people who were equally as stoked as I was. Seriously, when I started doing this a year ago, I made a “bucket list” if you will, of bands that I wanted to see live and shoot – and Arcade Fire was one of them. But I looked down upon the people inhabiting the floor with their general admission tickets, and a good 70 percent of the people I could see just standing there. It was only during the last few songs that they threw their arms up and rejoiced.
You paid $40 to see this show. Why aren’t you dancing around like a crazy fool? There weren’t even any crowd surfers. There were crowd surfers at the Matt & Kim show I saw the night before at the Showbox – a small club. Why not take advantage of the giant cluster of people and just let loose? I’ve heard criticism from some out-of-towners that Seattle’s pretty chill when it comes to shows – that we stand around with our arms crossed and bob our heads.
Frontman Win Butler said it best last night when he proclaimed, “for being the birthplace of grunge, you guys are pretty fucking polite.”
We don’t want to be polite. It’s an Arcade Fire show. Loosen up, Seattle!
Even though the crowd’s energy was luke warm most of the night, during the encore – “Intervention” and “Wake Up” – I finally felt like I was at an Arcade Fire show even up in the nosebleeds.
For more photos from the show, go to the full set at Flickr.
Set List
1. Ready to Start
2. Month of May
3. Keep the Car Running
4. Neighborhood #2 (Laika)
5. No Cars Go
6. Haïti
7. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
8. Modern Man
9. Rococo
10. The Suburbs
11. The Suburbs (Continued)
12. Ocean of Noise
13. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
14. We Used to Wait
15. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
16. Rebellion (Lies)
Encore:
17. Intervention
18. Wake Up
