Put aside for the moment the pretension and Pitchfork accolades.  Forget the fact that Reflektor, the follow-up to Arcade Fire’s Grammy winning The Suburbs, was premiered by streaming it in its entirety set to Marcel Camus’s 1959 film Black Orpheus.  Forget all that, listen to the first two tracks and then think about this:

What if those songs came out in 1980, and Joe Strummer was singing them?  Continue reading “Arcade Fire: Reflektor (2013)”

Sometimes you get a lot, and sometimes you get little.  Arcade Fire was all the rage about a decade ago, and I fell into the hype, trying to convince myself I could see the things in The Suburbs that others saw, or felt.  I don’t think I every actually got through the album in its entirety back then, and it was through the skin of my teeth I did so this time. Continue reading “Arcade Fire: The Suburbs (2010)”