Footage of Arcade Fire at a house party in 2002 shows a band with great things ahead. By Chris Salmon
Montreal collective Arcade Fire have spent this year being honoured at music's biggest award ceremonies and playing festival headline slots, but a terrific video has emerged from the days when a major show was a date at a friend's home. Head to bit.ly/arcfi02 to watch their 2002 house party performance of My Heart Is an Apple, a song that eventually emerged on their debut EP in 2003. Even playing to a less-than-enraptured audience, their ability to conjure grandiose music that stirs and soothes is apparent, as is frontman Win Butler's knack for a grand gesture: while his future wife R�gine Chassagne sings her part, he crawls off the stage and through the crowd's legs. The video inspired music blog Stereogum to trawl YouTube for footage of more indie artists before they made it. Go to bit.ly/b4famous to see acts including Feist, Vampire Weekend and Robyn in their pre-fame days.
We recently wrote about Pitchify.com, the excellent website that provides Spotify listening inspiration via links to hear any new album with a review of at least eight out of 10 on Pitchfork or Drowned in Sound. Now, the equally ingenious BBCify.co.uk has emerged, utilising data feeds from the BBC and Spotify to automatically create playlists based on the songs being played on the Corporation's output. So, whether you're a fan of Lauren Laverne's 6 Music programme, Rob Da Bank's Radio 1 slot or Rob Cowan's Radio 3 breakfast show, you can subscribe to a daily Spotify feed of either the last 100 available songs they played, or just the tracks from their latest programme. You can even subscribe to the playlists of selected TV shows, be it BBC1's Songs of Praise or BBC3's Mums Behaving Badly. It's a great idea, extremely well realised.
If you do your TV watching after midnight, you may have caught Channel 4's Abbey Road Debuts show, which is a bit like Later ? With Jools Holland without the established artists and the overbearing chumminess. Each episode features an upcoming act performing two songs, and you can catch up with several episodes on Channel 4's website at bit.ly/4odard. Each of the artists also played an extra song, which was held back for the show's SoundCloud profile, soundcloud.com/abbeyroaddebuts. The four tracks up so far include sprawling dubstep from Mount Kimbie, perky folkpop from Crystal Fighters, wide-eyed shoegazery from Trophy Wife and rollicking indie from Treefight for Sunlight. Having managed just 56 plays in their first 19 days online, they're certainly worthy of some more attention.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/04/click-to-download-arcade-fire-video
No comments:
Post a Comment