I spend a lot of time around here bemoaning the current ElectRock aesthetic as being both dumbed-down and old-hat, and I don’t ever really take a moment to build anything up.

Fine. Today I won’t say anything mean at all. Not even about Steve Aoki. I promise.

………………….

See? Keeping my promise.

I’ve had the utmost difficulty even desiring to post about the sheer brilliance of Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible. There’s a problem with the band having created such an utterly brilliant album (these are not singles, nor are these tracks for remixing…ooh, I want to hate on the Klaxons right here, but I made a promise…damn it)-it’s damn insulting to try to break it down into singles, or even to try to review it. Neon Bible is the album of 2007, gather your toys, move on, and let’s let the rest of the top 10 fall as they may for the rest of the year, as there’s no use even in disputing it. Equal parts New Order giddy half-light rave-up, Appalachian folk revival and Armageddon come-on, there’s not an instantly accessible moment on Neon Bible that doesn’t at once imbed itself into memory and yet constantly reveal new sonic layers with every listen (my thought upon first acquiring an actual mastered copy? “Holy shit, there are bells on ‘Intervention’!”).

As such, this has been haunting me today:

Arcade Fire, from the awesome Take-Away Shows put together by La Blogotheque (that’s right, a French blog that doesn’t scream ED BANG…oh, wait, I promised no venom today. Damn. It.), performing Neon Bible’s title track in a service elevator. This is utterly, utterly captivating, and if this is the first or the hundredth time you’ve heard this song, it’s never sounded more beautiful-right down to the ripping of pages from a magazine to create a functional, subtle beat.

I honestly can’t fathom a band, at this moment in music, that does more to restore faith in the sound.

Arcade Fire: Age of Consent

Since I hold fast in my refusal to break the new Arcade Fire album into singles for fruit snack-esque consumption (though it’s easily available if you want it in that fast food gimme-a-cheeseburger way, as I realize you may), here’s this-Arcade Fire covering New Order, proving their ability to wrap themselves around that tongue-in-cheek beauty and twist a line, a lyric, a melody and rewriting the word “simple” to mean “haunting”.