Arcade Fire news

Arcade Fire to score Donnie Darko director's new film.

Montreal's finest return from their holidays with a soundtrack of shadowy anthems. Expect hurdy gurdys and Cameron Diaz.

Sean Michaels
Tuesday May 13, 2008
guardian.co.uk

Arcade Fire and Richard Kelly seem to be unrelated - but as Donnie Darko taught us, the oddest things turn out to be connected.

The first are earnest art-rock musicians, gallivanting round Montreal's Mile End, the second is an idiosyncratic film auteur, busying himself on directing a new Cameron Diaz flick.

After months of touring, Arcade Fire returned to Montreal this spring for some quiet time. They sipped coffees and ate ice-creams, but apart from a few rallies for Barack Obama they waved off concert requests or the suggestion that they begin work on a third album.

They appeared, at least to the public, to be laying low.

Meanwhile, in Hollywood, journalists have been pestering director Richard Kelly about a sequel to his 2001 film, Donnie Darko. An unrelated production company has started work on S. Darko, which will follow the story of Donnie's younger sister Samantha. It's to be helmed by low-budget horror director Chris Fisher, and everyone is chasing Kelly's opinion.

Kelly doesn't want to talk about S. Darko. "I have absolutely no involvement with this production, nor will I ever be involved," he wrote on his MySpace blog . Instead, Kelly wants to talk about his new movie, Box, and of the intriguing musical collaboration involved.

The first clue was on Kelly's blog: "We're starting to work with a very famous band honouring us with being the first film-makers they've ever scored a film with," he wrote. But disclosed nothing more.

Producer Markus Dravs was not so tight-lipped however. On a page uncovered by Pitchfork News, the recording guru gave a succinct update on his current project. "Having finished Coldplay's forthcoming album," he wrote, "[I'm] now off to Canada to work with Arcade Fire on a soundtrack for the forthcoming Richard Kelly film."

And there it is. While Arcade Fire pretend to take a holiday they have in fact set to work on their first film project. It's not a tale of snowstorms or revolution, or a Wes Anderson excursion into the wilds of rural Quebec. Instead it's the adaptation of a 1970 Richard Matheson short story (and Twilight Zone episode) about a couple who find a box with a magic button. Every time they push the button, they receive a load of money - and someone, somewhere, dies.

Greed, murder and Cameron Diaz seem just the stuff for Arcade Fire's shadowy anthems. We'll hope for harp and hurdy gurdy in the scary bits, hollers and mandolin in the pretty bits. And the next time Arcade Fire claim to be taking some time off, we'll not believe them for a second.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Oscar Peterson

Oscar Peterson no more.

Canada's legendary jazz pianist, a technical virtuoso who performed with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie and inspired generations of jazz musicians, dies aged 82.

John Fordham
Tuesday December 25, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Oscar Peterson: 'could transform any melody into streams of spontaneous alternatives'. Photograph: AP

After the phenomenal jazz-piano virtuoso Art Tatum died in 1956, Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson - who had already been waiting in the wings for a decade - eased his formidable frame on to the throne. Like Tatum, Peterson had a Liszt-like technique (classical music's star pianists came to marvel at both of them), and could transform any melody into streams of spontaneous alternatives, sustain any tempo, use his left hand as freely as his right, and keep a faultless built-in rhythm section at work in his head. These skills made Peterson, who has died of kidney failure at the age of 82, one of the best-loved stars in the jazz mainstream.

The sympathetic but uncharitable among jazz purists might have held that Peterson was the unfortunate victim of his spectacular technique. All his performances would feature the same mix of flooding arpeggios, cascading introductions and codas, ragtime and barrelhouse pastiches, and solos at impossible tempos - and even after a stroke in 1993, the indomitable keyboard giant fought on to rebuild much of his sweeping technical authority. The standard Peterson trio offering would be the uptempo tune (either a standard or an original that sounded like a standard), starting either solo or with minimal accompaniment. It would grow in volume from both piano and drums in the second chorus, and by the third become an unbroken cascade of runs the length of the keyboard, resolving in thumping chords, thumbs-down-the-keys ripples and churning repeated phrases.

With cavalier glee, Peterson would apply this treatment to tunes ideally suited to it - like Anything Goes, or Sweet Georgia Brown - and to those that weren't, since he would often subject ballads to same burnups, bizarrely relapsing them into caresses at the end. Yet there was a true artist in Peterson too. Deliciously liquid arpeggios and arching, yearning phrases would sometimes emerge once he was sure he had given his audiences what they initially expected, and such contrastingly patient and spacious music might then allow the eloquence of his frequently superb accompanists to flower, notably the work of the double-bass giant Ray Brown.

Peterson had received classical piano lessons from the age of six in his native Montreal; the impetus came from his father, a railway porter and self-taught pianist. At 14, Oscar won a local radio talent contest, and worked in his late teens on a weekly Montreal radio show - and he was also a regular member of Canada's Johnny Holmes Orchestra, playing in an elegant swing keyboard style drawn from Teddy Wilson, Tatum and Nat "King" Cole. Though he had studied trumpet too, childhood illness led him to abandon it for the piano, and he practised constantly, an irrepressible enthusiasm mingling with natural gifts to build a fully two-handed technique (some 40s jazz pianists made relatively perfunctory use of the left hand) that rivalled that of classical recitalists. Though Cole was perhaps the artist Peterson felt most in sympathy with stylistically, the speed, orchestral richness and lyrical sweep of his music made the virtuoso Tatum the only fitting comparison once the Canadian's mature style formed.

Peterson resisted offers to come to America at first, but made his US debut at Carnegie Hall with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic in September 1949. Granz saw in Peterson just his kind of charismatic, communicative performer who reaches out from the subculture of jazz to a much wider audience, and he managed the pianist's career through the 1950s, recorded him, and regularly toured him with Jazz At The Philharmonic. Initially the pianist adopted the Cole trio's methods, frequently playing simply with guitar and double bass and allowing his own unerring rhythmic sense and driving swing to take the place of drums. Through the 1950s, Peterson's bassist was usually Brown, with Herb Ellis on guitar - but from 1958, Ellis was replaced by the subtle drummer Ed Thigpen, one of the few percussionists who could complement the storming Peterson without appearing to compete with him for the maximum number of sounds squeezable into a bar. The group recorded extensively, and Peterson's reworkings of classic standards were so exuberant and upbeat that his recordings found their way into the collections of jazz fans and fascinated non-buffs alike.

In 1960, Peterson founded the Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto - assisted by Brown, Thigpen and composer/clarinettist Phil Nimmons - and he remained there for the next three years, devoting much of his time to running the institution. But he continued to perform and record, and developed another string to his considerable bow by singing on a Cole dedication, With Respect to Nat, in 1965.

In the 1970s, though jazz was in retreat against the swelling popular and commercial pressure of rock'n'roll, Peterson continued to prove that his talents were robust enough to be less affected by the changing climate than most. He took to performing unaccompanied, and delivered astonishingly self-sufficient performances in which he frequently seemed to resemble two or three pianists playing simultaneously. By this time one of the most secure of mainstream international jazz stars, Peterson was now invited to perform in all kinds of contexts, including work with symphony orchestras, and guest appearances on many all-star jazz get-togethers with artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clark Terry, and guitarist Joe Pass. In later years Peterson frequently worked in duet with bassist Niels-Henning 0rsted Pedersen, a remarkable virtuoso of complementary gifts to the pianist's. Pared-down accompaniment always suited Peterson best, since his devastating technique frequently meant that the more musicians there were in a Peterson group, the more they would all try to keep up, like a party full of non-stop talkers.

Peterson had a prolific output as a recording artist, in some years releasing as many as half a dozen albums. Affinity (1963) was one of his biggest sellers, but his catalogue includes interpretations of the songbooks of Cole Porter and Duke Ellington, a highly successful single on Jimmy Forrest's compulsive Night Train (perfectly suited to Peterson's churningly machine-like style) and 1964's Canadiana Suite, an extended original nominated as one of the best jazz compositions of 1965 by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Peterson furnished the soundtrack to the movie Play It Again Sam, hosted a TV chat show a 1974 tour of Russia, and influenced musicians as different as Steve Winwood, Dudley Moore and Joe Zawinul. A dedicated spreader of the word, Peterson also published educational works for student jazz pianists.

Though Peterson has sometimes been criticised as a musician in thrall to his own runaway technique, he remained a great virtuoso of piano jazz, and an equally effective populariser of the music among those who might otherwise not have encountered it. He was the kind of jazz musician who invited a sometimes-daunted general public in, and he always performed as if making the music was the most fun it was possible for a human being to have. When he performed to a packed Royal Albert Hall two years ago, Peterson delivered a startlingly ambitious programme for a man who looked as if the journey from the dressing-room to the piano stool had been a considerable effort of the will. That show could have been a wistful tribute to what once was - but with musicality, courage, skill and energy, Peterson made it a performance that stood proud on its own two feet. It was the story of his life.

In that same year of 2005, he became the first living person other than the monarch to feature on a Canadian commemorative stamp, and he saw his name adopted for streets, concert halls and schools. He is survived by his fourth wife, Kelly, their daughter Celine, and six children from previous marriages.

Oscar Emmanuel Peterson, jazz pianist, born August 15 1925; died December 23 2007

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Arcade Fire

The bitter taste of success.

They've crashed into the mainstream and Hollywood adores them, but Arcade Fire aren't happy. Alexis Petridis meets a band trying to make sense of their ascent to stardom

Friday October 26, 2007

The Guardian

Randall's Island sits in the middle of New York's East River, a vast, characterless, landfill-augmented field, surrounded by straits given the kind of alluring names that New York's outer boroughs seem to specialise in: to the east there's Hell Gate and to the north, Bronx Kill. If it's not quite as ghastly as the waters around it suggest, Randall's Island certainly doesn't exude much in the way of charm, even in the sunshine of an unseasonably hot autumn afternoon. It is, concedes Richard Reed Parry - Arcade Fire's affable red-headed multi-instrumentalist sometimes known to play a crash helmet with a drumstick onstage - a far cry from the venues at which the band are renowned for performing: the churches that seem to echo the quasi-religious fervour in their music, the "aesthetically inspiring" spaces in which Parry has claimed they play their best. "We wanted the whole place hung with carnival lights," he sighs sadly, "but the city wouldn't let us do it." Instead, for the event they are headlining, Arcade Fire have attempted to stamp some quirky personality on the field by erecting a small stage to its rear on which a mariachi band play unamplified. Alas, the mariachi leader ends up singing his heart out and talking about how grateful they are to be here to a scattering of nonplussed punters, pausing only momentarily on their way between the hot dog stands and the Portaloos.

But if you wanted an indication of the magnitude of Arcade Fire's rise since the March release of their second album, Neon Bible, then Randall's Island and the nonplussed punters would do nicely. A couple of years ago, Arcade Fire were a critically acclaimed seven-piece, alt-rock act, albeit one noted for the intensity of their live shows, their frenzied, evangelical cult following, their penchant for dressing like 19th-century American farmers and for the fact that their two central members were a married couple, Win Butler and Regine Chassagne: the former the son of a wealthy Texan oilman who had moved to Montreal to form a band, the latter the daughter of Haitian refugees who had landed in Quebec in flight from "Baby Doc" Duvalier's dictatorship. They played the kind of venues that critically acclaimed alt-rock acts perform in: when asked by U2 to support them on a handful of Canadian stadium dates, the band viewed the shows, Parry says, with the bemused detachment of people who weren't really supposed to be there, dumbfounded by what he calls the "huge, ginormo machine of a production". "It was," he recalls, "like, whoah."

And yet, here they are, barely two years later, performing to 22,000 people, a crowd, Parry notes, that is "as big as one of those U2 shows". They are at the end of a vast American tour during which they were feted not by the kind of rock aristocrats who have queued up to garland the band with praise since the release of their debut album, Funeral, (David Bowie and David Byrne have both performed with them, while earlier this year a journalist at a New York show reported, aghast, that he had seen Lou Reed actually smile at the conclusion of their performance), but by a rather different kind of celebrity: Scarlett Johansson, Drew Barrymore and James Spader all turned up to see them in Hollywood, as did Rod Stewart, an artist whose love for apocalyptically inclined, anthemic baroque art-rock had previously gone strangely unnoticed.

The audience thronging Randall's Island, meanwhile, is conspicuously light on the kind of whey-faced indie-kid blogger whose early support earned Arcade Fire that most noughties of labels, the Internet Phenomenon. Instead, there are baseball caps and shorts and Gap casual wear in profusion: this is very much a mainstream American rock crowd.

It is all evidence of success of a kind that should, theoretically, cause headaches and hand-wringing in Arcade Fire's ranks. This is, after all, a band who zealously guard their independence and rigorously shun the celebrity that seems an inescapable by-product of your second album reaching the Top 10 around the world. "The song is independent of my face and what I look like," says Chassagne. "I know in pop music people are really used to, like, relating it to the person who made it and what they eat and what they do every day, but to me it's just independent." Nor could you accuse them of rapaciously pursuing global domination: earlier this year, Butler was heard to bemoan,"bands who think in terms of, 'I'm going to be the biggest band in the world, fuck all those bands who've got no ambition,'" as "a total crock of shit". Then there's the fact that Arcade Fire thrive, according to Parry, on "playing small rooms where you can really get in people's faces and connect with them and wrestle with them".

In an air-conditioned dressing room backstage, however, Butler is inclined to disagree. Slumping his 6ft 5in frame into an armchair - somehow he looks even bigger in mufti than in his onstage costume - he protests that there has been little hand-wringing about Arcade Fire's burgeoning mainstream success: for one thing, he says, success means it's easier to refuse to do things you don't want to do. Nor is he particularly sorry to see the back of playing small venues: indeed, he prefers playing Randall's Island or the Hollywood Bowl to the euphoric, wildly acclaimed performances they gave at London's St John's Church and Porchester Hall in January. "This tour is the opposite of the sell-it-out hype thing. It's more about letting people who want to see us, see us. That feels really good. A lot of these shows have been more intimate than the warm-up shows we did in the churches because they were so overwhelming and press-centered."

Perhaps Butler's contrariness should come as little surprise. He is famously no great fan of the media, claiming never to read anything written about the band which means that this year he'll have missed both the appearance of a blog called Arcade Fire Stole My Basketball, on which an outraged fellow user of the Cal Berkeley gym baldly accused him of the theft alluded to in the title, and Arcade Fire being called the Greatest Band in the World by at least three different British periodicals.

You get the impression that being interviewed seldom constitutes the highlight of his day. Today, he's scrupulously polite and thoughtful in his answers, but you would never confuse him with a boundless font of easygoing bonhomie. "I don't like the process of having to promote an album and talk about it," he says, flatly, "and I learnt pretty early on that the artist always seems like the asshole in the situation, no matter what you do. Even if, like, someone was poking you in the face and you went 'fucking stop that!', when the article comes out, it'll be like that happened in slow motion." He mimes giving someone the finger in slow motion, then sighs. "You can't win "

Both he and Parry think Arcade Fire's aversion to celebrity may have something to do with their roots in Montreal. For one thing, there are arts grants available to bands that instil a certain anti-commercial sensibility in the city's musicians: "They encourage people to think that being an artist is a viable way of life, that doing something that won't necessarily make money is a worthwhile thing to do."

For another, there is the shadow of the French Quebec pop scene, packed with artists unknown outside of its confines, but who apparently "sell as many records as Arcade Fire do worldwide, just in Quebec". "In Montreal, we're not celebrities at all, those people are celebrities," says Butler. Parry nods. "Occasionally, we've noticed that people are kind of surprised, like, wow, you've done really well, you're nearly as big as Jean LeClerc."

But whatever the reason, Butler has gained the reputation of a prickly and rather difficult customer. His understandable desire to avoid what he calls "the hoops" of the music industry - "all the things that have nothing to do with playing your instrument or playing together that take up a lot more energy than actually playing music and connecting with people"- has occasionally shown a tendency to look more like unappealing petulance.

It was Butler who smashed a camera with his mandolin and stormed off stage during Arcade Fire's appearance on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, apparently piqued because the band had to sit in the green room with the other guests while he wanted to visit a friend instead.

In fact, the ill-humoured appearance on Jonathan Ross was indicative of what was, by all accounts, a difficult summer for Arcade Fire. Despite the critical plaudits and commercial success, says Butler, "there have definitely been points in this year when we've been pretty down". Oddly, given their obsession with turning a live show into a communal experience in which the music invites a transcendent mass singalong, Parry came to the conclusion during a gruelling round of festival appearances that Arcade Fire were simply "not a festival band".

Certainly, their performance at Glastonbury, anticipated by many as the event's highlight, fell noticeably short of expectation: while no disaster, they didn't quite set the sodden environs of Worthy Farm alight in the way that their forebears Radiohead did a decade before.

For their part, Arcade Fire seem to have been faintly horrified by the Glastonbury experience. "There's something charming about how disorganised and hippy it is even though it's on that level," says Butler, his Texas drawl modulating into a tone that suggests he didn't think there was anything charming about it whatsoever, "but it was a fucking nightmare. It was like a mudpit. You have to drive your truck through the middle of the crowd of -" he pauses, as if grasping for the words to describe the ghastliness "- of shit," he finally decides.

"People are like, throwing up and hitting the doors and things like that. I get the appeal of wanting to get high for the first time and wanting to run round the fields, you know, but that's not necessarily the most engaging experience to me." Parry nods: "We were just, like, what in God's name is this?" "Why would I be here if I wasn't playing?"

They have toured almost consistently since January, a schedule that proved so punishing Butler and Parry alight on the singer contracting an acute sinus infection in March as an unlikely highlight: "Even though I was recovering from surgery, it was great, we had a month with nothing to do." They talk with a contagious wistfulness about the pleasure of being in the studio - at one point, Butler offers a description of recording a track off their debut album called Haiti that's so detailed it borders on fetishism - of returning to the converted church where they recorded Neon Bible, of finding a way to break out of the album-tour-album-tour treadmill. "We're going to find a way," says Butler. "That's the next great challenge. It's not the best system for creativity, because that's not the way it works: be creative for two years, don't be creative for two years."

That night, as they take the Randall's Island stage, he announces with barely concealed relish that this is the last time Arcade Fire will play New York "for a couple of years". The audience hoot their derision. "Yeah," says Butler, heavily. "Boo. Hiss."

Road-weary or not, they are magnificent on the stage. By the encore, Butler's brother Will is hanging perilously from the lighting rig and Arcade Fire have genuinely succeeded in transforming Randall's Island into something magical: a sea of swaying hands, a vast choir of voices singing along to Wake Up's wordless chorus. At the show's conclusion, the band rush into the crowd where they perform a frantic cover of the Violent Femmes' Kiss Off, to the delight of fans within earshot and the visible horror of security. It is, as Parry would say, like, whoah.

Backstage, I see Butler and Chassagne talking with fans, still holding an acoustic guitar and an accordion respectively, distractedly picking out a tune as they chat. Then they slip away into the dressing room, still playing their instruments.

· Arcade Fire play SECC, Glasgow, tonight. Then tour.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Oldies and Goldies

Some old albums still sell like new.

Titles from the '80s and '90s by bands such as AC/DC, Bon Jovi and Metallica continue to do a brisk business.

By JAKE COYLE

The Associated Press

A POWERFUL PREMIERE: The debut album by Metallica, featuring singer-guitarist James Hetfield, is the second-biggest selling album of the Nielsen SoundScan era. It sold 275,000 copies in 2006.

BERTIL ERICSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Much of the rock 'n' roll and pop canon is well established.

Buying the albums of '60s and '70s acts like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley is akin to a rite of passage for any young music fan. These are the artists that baby boomers love to keep buying, and with whom seemingly every teenager at some point experiments. (Remember A.J. hearing Bob Dylan for the first time in the "Sopranos" finale?)

Now that the '80s and '90s are ancient history, what albums are people still buying from those decades? Do critical favorites like Radiohead and the Pixies grow more popular with time? Or do the Backstreet Bo ys and Madonna still rule the charts?

The short answer is that, above all, people are buying vintage Metallica, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Guns 'N Roses and, well, Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

AC/DC's "Back in Black" (1980) last year sold 440,000 copies and has thus far old 156,000 this year, according to the Nielsen SoundScan catalog charts, which measure how well physical albums older than two years old are selling. (All figures for this article were provided by Nielsen SoundScan.)

Those "Back in Black" numbers would make most contemporary CDs a success. Metallica's self-titled 1991 album is altogether the second-biggest selling album of the Nielsen SoundScan era, which began in 1991. "Metallica" sold 275,000 copies last year.

Bon Jovi's greatest hits collection "Cross Road" last year sold 324,000 copies, while Guns 'N Roses "Appetite for Destruction" (1987) sold 113,000. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Christmas Eve and Other Stories" (1996) continues to be a holiday favorite; it was bought 289,000 times last year.

Greatest hits compilations are counted as catalog releases, and account for the majority of vintage best-sellers. Artists that commercially peaked in the '80s or '90s that have had lucrative best-of collections include Garth Brooks, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tim McGraw, Creed, Queen, Tom Petty, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Def Leppard, Aerosmith and Lionel Richie.

U2, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Celine Dion, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Dave Matthews Band and the ever-touring Jimmy Buffett also all continue to sell large amounts of old records.

Michael Jackson, of course, still has one of the most desirable back catalogs. His best- selling "Thriller" moves over 60,000 copies a year and his "Number Ones" collection yielded 162,000 sales last year.

Avid fans may be buying everything their favorite artist puts out, but there's more than nostalgia fueling vintage sales.

"Young fans aren't excluded from catalog sales – especially the ones who really get interested in music, there's always that sense of discovery," says Geoff Mayfield, the director of charts at Billboard Magazine.

Not everything maintains long-term success. Asia's self-titled 1982 album was the biggest seller of 1982, but only sold 5,000 copies last year. Whitney Houston's 1985 debut, also self-titled, was 1986's top album, but now sells about 7,000 discs a year.

The same trajectory has befallen past mega-hits like Ace of Base's "The Sign," Bobby Brown's "Don't Be Cruel" and the Spice Girl's "Spice." Though one of the best selling artists of all time, Mariah Carey's self-titled debut sold a measly 5,000 copies last year. The Backstreet Boys' "Millennium" managed only 9,000 sales.

Alas, the turning wheel of fortune isn't always kind to boy bands. "The only thing that kept coming to mind to me was that line in the Bruce Springsteen song: 'Someday we'll look back at this and it will all seem funny,' " recalls Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke.

Now, some critical hits that were trounced on their initial release by the likes of 'N Sync can claim a measure of commercial superiority. The Flaming Lips' "Soft Bulletin," often hailed as one of the best albums of the '90s by critics, sold a solid 38,000 copies last year.

Radiohead's legendary "OK Computer," currently celebrating its 10-year anniversary, last year sold 94,000 copies. Nirvana's "Nevermind" has done even better; it sold 143,000 copies in 2006.

Current events can alter the charts. When Ray Charles died, his older albums spiked for months, says Mayfield. A new album from Alanis Morissette would surely increase sales of her 1995 disc "Jagged Little Pill," one of the best selling albums of the past 20 years.

Likewise, recent reunions of the Police and Genesis can be expected to increase sales of their catalogs. The Police's 1986 compilation "Every Breath You Take" has already doubled its already strong 2006 sales by selling 107,000 copies so far this year.

Many well-regarded albums continue to do healthy business, including: U2's "Joshua Tree," Dr. Dre's "The Chronic," Beck's "Odelay," Wu-Tang Clan's "Enter the Wu-Tang," the Clash's "London Calling," Weezer's "Weezer," and the Pixies' "Doolittle." Each sold at least 20,000 copies last year.

Still, many albums that are consistently revered on critic top-ten lists of the '80s and '90s have not sold much. Joy Division's "Closer," the Smiths' "The Queen is Dead," My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless," and REM's "Murmur" all sold 12,000 copies or less last year.

Labels often reissue classic releases to capitalize on the devotion of die-hard fans and to attract a new audience. In the past few years, revered indie label Matador Records has released Pavement's first three albums, including "Slanted and Enchanted," a disc frequently ranked among the best in the '90s.

"It's almost like a new release for us," says Matador founder Chris Lombardi. "We probably sold in a one-year period, pretty much what those records sold in their first year period when they were initially released."

Though hip-hop continues to rule today's charts, many of its most historic albums don't enjoy the catalog sales that those from rock's heyday do. Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" sold 15,000 copies last year; Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" sold 22,000; and Run DMC's "Raising Hell" sold far less than both.

So far this year, catalog sales are down 11.7 percent, but that's stronger than overall sales, which are down 14.7 percent, according to Billboard. It's a major portion of the music business. This year's total catalog sales of 95.6 million copies accounts for about 40 percent of all albums sold physically.

When people switched from cassette tapes to compact discs, catalog sales received a windfall as people re-bought their collections. The onset of digital downloading hasn't had that affect because CDs can easily be downloaded to your iPod, but digital stores do have the advantage of unlimited (virtual) store space to sell older music.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has pegged catalog downloads as 64 percent of all download sales in the U.S. (Apple declined to share its iTunes data on catalog sales.) That still leaves illegal downloads unaccounted for, as well as a more important quantity: cultural impact. Though bands like Sonic Youth, the Ramones and Public Enemy may never sell as much as other acts, their influence remains immeasurable.

"Impact is not strictly about sales," says Fricke. "Otherwise everyone would be running around forming bands that sound exactly like Poison."

Emily Haines

Dancing to depression.

What's wrong with Emily Haines, asks Laura Barton

Friday June 8, 2007
The Guardian

"I found this thing," says Emily Haines, through jet lag and a sip of Pimm's, "that I drew when I was really young. On a piece of paper, it says: 'What's wrong?' underlined twice, and then a big empty box, and then it just says Emily Haines at the bottom. And I thought, oh my God, that's basically what I've been doing for my entire career! Walking into a situation and seeing how well I can identify what's wrong with it. And describe it. And I think I can do that pretty well."

The various incarnations of Emily Haines - her sometime membership of the Canadian indie supergroup Broken Social Scene; the angular danceability of her band Metric - share that quality. And it's there in her downbeat new solo record, Knives Don't Have Your Back, credited to Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton. "It's the same songwriting process as for Metric," she says. "But the whole point of Metric, sonically and in the whole philosophy of the band, is we're trying to kick the ass of depression. You're not allowed to wallow. So I bring those songs to the band and we speed them up and turn them into something we can dance to. Which is a great way to stay off antidepressants.

"I'm interested in the people who are inclined to be a little bit sad, who maybe see things in a sepia tone but without being mopes necessarily. And I like that about Metric - it's not the Jackson 5 pretending things are happy when they're not, it's acknowledging that actually things are a bit fucked and finding a way to turn that into something else."

Haines refers proudly to the fact that Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, has said Metric are the band all 14-year-old girls ought to be listening to. It is a responsibility, she says, but one she accepts readily. Indeed, with songs such as Patriarch on a Bicycle and Glass Ceiling, Haines has established herself as a feminist songwriter. Her new record includes a song named A Maid Needs a Maid. Is this, one wonders, a direct retort to her fellow countryman Neil Young's A Man Needs a Maid? "I can see there would be a feminist reading of that song. But it wasn't really intended that way. I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but growing up I never understood that song, I didn't know what he meant. Whaddyawant? Someone who cleans up after you?" She olds her pale features into a frown. "And when I was writing this record, I realised I had that exact feeling, as a result of touring and other things, where my ability to connect with somebody actually came down to being a very functional approach to love and companionship." It is, she confesses, something of a habit of hers to try to solve a problem by writing a song about it. "But that doesn't work," she adds ruefully. "It doesn't solve the problem."

There is an air of zealotry and self-awareness to Haines. She speaks of her new dedication to writing songs that aren't about what's wrong. And she has a new ambition to embrace spontaneity. "I feel like I meet people more and more where there's a tone that, 'You're going to get old so you might as well start now.' And so it's a daily decision of mine to allow things to happen that haven't happened before." Today, for example, she went to Trafalgar Square to recreate a photograph of her father, the jazz-poet Paul Haines, who died in 2003.

She has now come to terms, she says, with the fact that the life she has chosen, as a touring musician, as a dedicated experiential liver, may preclude some aspects of conventional life. "I'm accepting I may not have it all," she says, looking somehow bold. "I may not have a husband and a family. I may have an adventure."

· Knives Don't Have Your Back is out now on Drowned in Sound Recordings

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Broken Social Scene

Just one big happy family, eh?

How can you keep track of a band with no fixed line-up, scores of side projects, and whose founder is disappointed in himself? Laura Barton reports from Toronto on the soap opera that is Broken Social Scene

Friday August 25, 2006
The Guardian


Canada's supergroup ... Broken Social Scene

Ableary-eyed Amy Millan is winding her way across Toronto in a desperate search for coffee. The traffic lights switch to green and she scans the streets with a face dogged by a hangover and startled by makeup. A pair of sparkly red ballet slippers sits in the passenger seat. We pull up outside Jet Fuel Coffee in Cabbagetown, where Millan used to work, and she is two steps on to the pavement when the heckling starts. "Hey Amy!" they holler. "Aren't you some big star now?"

Millan is indeed some big star here in Toronto. Poised to release her solo album, Honey From the Tombs, she notched up a fine reputation with the Montreal-based band Stars, flaunting a voice that is fine-spun, breathy and distinctive. But it was her role as a vocalist for Broken Social Scene that truly led her into the limelight; with Millan, as with so many Canadian artists today, all roads lead to Broken Social Scene.

BSS is a Canadian supergroup or artistic collective, call it what you will, that began in 1999 with Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, and has been accumulating members ever since. Today some 20 musicians drift in and out, including solo performers Leslie Feist and Jason Collett, plus Emily Haines and James Shaw of Metric, as well as countess others. BSS has somehow succeeded in producing three albums: the mainly instrumental debut Feel Good Lost (2001), the exceptional and impressionistic You Forgot It in People (2002) and last year's Broken Social Scene. But it is live that they catch fire, as a kind of indie jam band. At times BSS on stage will accommodate five guitarists, horns, drums, strings, three female vocalists and a couple of male voices to create a whirling, diving, clamour of sound, in shows that can stretch to three hours.

Today the offices of the BSS's Toronto-based record label, Arts & Crafts, are crammed with boxes of merchandise, waiting to be shipped across to Olympic Island where tomorrow the group are curating a festival. The show will see 10,000 fans make the short ferry-hop from the mainland to bask in the sunshine and in performances by Raising the Fawn, J Mascis, Feist and Bloc Party, with a grand finale by BSS.

To Jeffrey Remedios of Arts & Crafts, the Olympic Island show is a celebration of four years of hard graft, during which all involved lived with a persistent fear "that we were going to fuck it up". Five years ago Remedios was working for Virgin, craving a little more independence, a tad more creativity. "At the same time what was happening in Toronto was this incredible burgeoning music community," he recalls. "All these bands were starting to really come together, all these clubs were full, everyone would be going out to see local bands, which was a relatively new thing for us. It sort of hit critical mass at a certain time."

Already a good friend and sometime roommate of Canning and Drew, he at first took a mild interest in their project. "But then they made You Forgot It in People, and they got me into the studio and said whaddyathink? And I said I'm in, I'm totally in." That meant leaving Virgin to found a record label, management company and music publisher with Drew, "that would just be like an arts collective, like the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts, that kind of theory".

Arts & Crafts started with one band, Broken Social Scene, and has grown steadily since. "Social Scene really are the band that are at the centre of this community," insists Remedios. "The true ethos of that band is a collection of people collaborating together from other projects. So they're in the core. In the beginning they would play shows at [Toronto venue] Ted's Wrecking Yard, and they'd play all new songs every show, and they'd play once a month. You Forgot It in People was birthed from that. So one week James and Emily from Metric would be there, the next month Feist, the next month Amy and Evan from Stars. And it just hit, it hit really fast."

Back in Cabbagetown, Millan, propped up by latte, is attempting to explain the complex, intertwining histories of the members of BSS. She first met Kevin Drew at summer camp. "And of course Emily I met on the first day at school. She came up and asked where the music class was. We walked in and we were late, and there was what felt like 200 kids all facing us. But it was better because we had each other, and that sort of bonded us as a force. We were very, very good friends for a very, very long time. Emily was already writing absolutely amazing songs and I started singing with her and ..." She has barely begun her story when another fan wanders over. "Amy! Hey Amy!"

While its shape-shifting enormity has been part of BSS's attraction, it has also provided its own complications, particularly for Canning and Drew. "The family is constantly expanding," nods Canning. "But we let ourselves get pulled in a lot of different ways, and you can kinda forget we're the founding members of this group. It just feels like this abstract thing." And the difficulties have not just been musical. "Over the years there's been such emotional tumult. It must be the same with every band, but then when you throw men and women together and start playing music together, it's like being at summer camp."

It's easy to imagine that Canning and Drew might grow a little irked by the constant to-ing and fro-ing of their band members, but Drew insists not. "It would annoy me if their bands were bad. But they're not. Bands like Stars and Metric need to be there, and we've been very grateful for the time they've devoted to us." Besides, he argues, they enjoy a kind of symbiotic relationship. "They will burn out on their own shit and come back to us and say, 'Can I just not think about stuff for a month?' And they take that energy and they use it really well in their own bands."

Two BSS members currently pursuing another project in earnest are Emily Haines and James Shaw, singer and guitarist in the more straightforward, punky Metric. "James and I write with BSS pretty regularly," she explains, "but it's a very different kind of role, especially for me. I really enjoy playing the supporting part. Social Scene is about donating yourself. And the thing is, we don't see each other that often. It's a way to romanticise your friendships, because you don't have to put up with the day-to-day."

Though Metric formed in New York, the band members have since returned home to Toronto, making them more available, presumably, for further collaborations. "It just felt like the right time," says Haines. "[Canada's] a pretty utopian place at the moment, there's a lot happening. I guess what keeps me going is my interest in other people. Everyone I know, that seems to be their desire: to collaborate. They need to connect."

Drew, however, isn't feeling the connections so profoundly these days. "None of us has any time any more in this band," he says over dinner the night before the Olympic Island festival, spearing his pasta. "There's lots of families and personal stuff, other bands going on, so Social Scene has become ... it's lost a bit of its love outside of when we're together, but when we're together it's there." Does the loss of love concern him? "It disappoints me a bit because I feel that if we all gave it 170% then we would be doing a lot better than we are. We were always a music band that loved music. And we've now gone into a format of playing the same songs all the time. It's great because we have rotating members so you always have different magic, and personality-wise it's difficult to always be on the road so it's nice to have different conversations. But we've been touring non-stop for the last four years now, so it's just at a point where we've got to find something new about it."

He is quick to point out that he has thoroughly enjoyed the past few years. "But it's also been some of the most stereotypical narcissistic times in our lives," he says. "I think you hit a point where you're disappointed in yourself maybe, and that point for me was when I kind of took it for granted. And it's also very difficult to make music when you're talking about it all the time, you're always planning your future and where you're going to go and all that, and it does suck the life out of why you wanted to do it."

What would he rather talk about? "I'd rather learn," he replies earnestly. "I'd rather use conversation as an education platform, instead of talking about booze and how fucking hard it is to cope as a group or a family or a band. We were always an experiment in intimacy. That's something Jason Collett said to me once, and I liked that. I liked the idea that people were into us because it never was supposed to work with this many people, and financially we were supposed to be ruined and internally we were supposed to be ruined. There's be a lot of fucked up things that have happened over the last couple of years, but we're still here and there's still love for each other."

It is 12.59pm on Olympic Island, and there is a still patch of calm before the gates open. The sun shines slow and steady, beers sit cooling in big icy barrels. You hear the squeals first, then the thunderous approach of the first stampede of hipsters charging across the grass to secure their territory at the front of the stage. By the time Broken Social Scene take to the stage shortly before 9pm, the crowd is itchy with anticipation. It is an outstanding, unexpectedly moving performance, the already preposterous number of band members on stage bolstered by the friends and family that seem to spill from the wings. The night concludes in a final, stunning triumvirate of Ibi Dreams of Pavement, It's All Gonna Break, and KC Accidental. And, for a glorious while, Broken Social Scene, in all its fragmented, dissonant, weary parts, seem again united.

Five essential records from the Canadian scene

Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It in People
Back in 2002, cramming umpteen musicians on to an album seemed an outlandish concept. Yet You Forgot It in People bloomed with a mesmerising creativity, best illustrated by the breathless, otherworldly Anthems for a 17-Year-Old Girl.

Metric - Live It Out
One of this year's best albums so far, this is the second offering from Metric, and marks out Haines as one of the brightest stars in music right now. Politically charged and with a stoked-up fire in its belly, Live It Out is also disturbingly danceable.

Feist - Let It Die
The solo project of BSS's Leslie Feist. Unabashedly romantic, Let It Die is steeped in cocktail jazz and bossa nova; it's her most sumptuous offering yet.

Stars - Set Yourself on Fire
Stars are made up of Chris Seligman and Pat McGee, along with BSS members Amy Millan, Torquil Campbell and Evan Cranley. Their piece de resistance is this album from 2005: a cathartic confection of strings, horns, colliding female-male vocals and Casio keyboards.

Jason Collett - Idols of Exile
Collett is a part of BSS's wall-of-guitar sound, but here he drifts back to his folkier roots to bring us a delightful album, full of summery, wistful tracks such as Hangover Days.

· Broken Social Scene and Metric play the Carling Weekend at Leeds on Friday and Reading on Sunday

Related articles

27.01.2006: CD: Broken Social Scene, Broken Social Scene
21.12.2005: Broken Social Scene, Cargo, London
07.07.2006: CD: Metric, Live It Out

Useful link
Broken Sccial Scene official site

Sarah McLachlan news

Sarah McLachlan Covers John and Yoko

by Paul Cashmere @ Undercover

August 9 2006

Sarah McLachlan

Sarah McLachlan has recorded the Lennon classic ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over) for her forthcoming holiday album Wintersong.

Just as John and Yoko had the Harlem Community Choir perform on the original, Sarah has used a choir from her hometown on Vancouver.

"As a kid," she says, "music saved my life; having that one thing that I knew I was good at made all the difference. It feels so good to be able to see their lives impacted. There's hardly any joy comparable."

Sarah founded The Sarah McLachlan Music Outreach program in 2003 to provide free music education for school students.

Other songs on the album include a cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’ but the Christmas classics ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’, ‘Silent Night’, and ‘The First Noel/Mary Mary’.

Guests on the record include Diana Krall and Jim Creegan from Barenaked Ladies.

Wintersong will be released on October 8th.

WINTERSONG Track listing:

1. Happy Xmas (War is Over)
2. What Child Is This (Greensleeves)
3. River
4. Wintersong
5. I'll Be Home For Christmas
6. O Little Town of Bethlehem
7. The First Noel/ Mary Mary
8. Silent Night
9. Song For A Winter's Night
10. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
11. In A Bleak Mid Winter
12. Christmas Time Is Here

Daniel Lanois: The frontier spirit

Daniel Lanois's music has taken him to the Moon and back, via U2. Now he's taking pedal-steel guitar into a new realm. Alasdair Lees hears how

Published: 27 July 2005

Watching Daniel Lanois play his pedal-steel guitar up close is a remarkable experience. Hunched all in black over its rectangular stand in the basement studio of his Gothic mansion in the Hollywood hills, he goes into a state of what he would call the "arrogance of concentration", a commitment not to be distracted by anything other than the work. The instrument makes a lovely, limpid sound as he moves the steel slide along the strings and plucks them with his picks, lightly depressing the foot pedals, finding the perfect pitch. He likes to play high up on the strings, where it makes a "raindrop sound". "It's a powerful tool. It's one of the things that I can do that gets me out of my head," he says passionately. "I like to lose myself in the sound."

He is playing a piece from his new album, Belladonna, a dark collection of instrumentals that places the pedal steel centre-stage, backed by little more than drums, piano and acoustic guitar. Full of the kind of murky sonics that Lanois has brought to his Grammy-winning production work for Bob Dylan, U2 and others, it sees Lanois taking pedal-steel-playing into fresh territory.

"The playing I'm doing now is a continuation of the playing I did with Brian Eno, but maybe a little less western," he says, referring to their 1983 collaboration, Apollo. "I've found a more gospel style and my knowledge of the instrument is far superior. Traditionally the pedal-steel is played in a much more country way, but I've been evolving my chord sequences."

After three song-based solo albums, Lanois decided it was time to clean his palette. "I did it just to get myself off the song hook. I thought it was time to revisit that great chapter that I had with Eno in Canada," he says. "There was something about the dedication we had in finding sonics that had never been expressed before. It was a great laboratory, a fantastic place of experimentation and great results. We became masters of ambient music simply because we loved it and we were dedicated to it. I hope this album is a revisit of those values.

"I decided that I wanted to make an instrumental record because the mind and the imagination of a listener is freed in a certain kind of way in the absence of lyrics. I didn't want to dilute the effort of this instrumental music by putting lyrics on it. I wanted to make a really beautiful, timeless record - perhaps wear the shoes of Miles Davis - and make a record that would be transcending and elevating to the listener."

Lanois's father and grandfather were both noted French-Canadian fiddle-players in his home town of Hull, Quebec. "On the piano, you can hit a few notes and you'll be in tune because they're just keys," he explains. "On the pedal-steel, it's like a violin - you constantly have to be using your ear to pitch. The pedals are quite complex, too; everybody has their own tuning, as I have mine. It represents dedication: it's not an instrument you can dabble with." His cherished "piece of green maple with 10 strings" is the same one his mother, a singer, bought for him in Ontario when he was nine.

He recorded Belladonna on the Baja Peninsula in Mexico. "I've always had a fascination with the South," he says. "As a Canadian kid, I went to New Orleans [where he set up his Kingsway studio in the Eighties, and recorded the Neville Brothers' Yellow Moon and Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy] to further my education. The bass gets better the farther south you go," he laughs. "I grew up with a lot of beautiful melodies - it was a storytelling culture - but we never really understood the sexuality of bass. New Orleans was the beginning of that journey for me." It was the next logical step, therefore, to move over the border. "I really like the sound of Mexican records. I think south-of-the-border music is exotic and sexual.

"I like the idea of suggesting that, in these fast times, there is a place you can go to: a desert place; a place of isolation or the desert within oneself. When you go to a place where you might experience silence, you could find out something about yourself."

Belladonna was performed in New York in June, and Lanois is to tour the album with the Chicagoan post-rockers Tortoise in October. It should make for a powerful live experience. "This is a heavy record. It's not to be confused with a sweet, atmospheric record that you might do massage to. That's not the nature of the beast."

'Belladonna' is out now on Anti- Records

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

Alanis Learns to Laugh

Jagged little comic.

Morissette takes her backstage antics to TV

With her rockumentary-style sitcom We're With the Band premiering this fall on Comedy Central, Alanis Morissette is shedding her angry-rock-chick label for good. The show, executive-produced by Morissette with Tom Hanks, will follow the pop star's life on and off the stage, chronicling the amusing situations she and her fellow bandmates fall into. Similar to the style of Curb Your Enthusiasm (which Morissette has appeared in), the dialogue will be unscripted, allowing Morissette to relive her teenage years as a member of an improvisation troupe.

Her blockbuster debut Jagged Little Pill (which sold more than 14 million copies in the U.S.) and its jilted-lover anthem "You Oughta Know" cemented her fiery reputation, even prompting SportsCenter announcers to shout over Toronto Maple Leafs highlights, "That was for Alanis Morissette's pain!" The singer-songwriter is embracing the album's tenth anniversary in June, re-recording all the tracks acoustically for a new release and a supporting U.S. tour.

But for now, she's just happy to make people laugh.

How important is it now for you to make fun of yourself?

Well, the older I get, the funnier things get. So I think there is a levity that has come as I grow and hopefully mature.

What is it about improv that you're drawn to?

I think the stream-of-consciousness of it. I love that it's not a crafted piece that I'm contorting into, but rather a story being told that is allowing me to personalize it. I've been in comedy improv troupes since I was fourteen. I love the teammate-ship aspect of it. There's no room for stealing the show.

Can you share some of the fodder for the show?

When I was backstage with my bandmates in '95 or '96, the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish [Darius Rucker] asked to come backstage. He came back, and we were all talking to him, but after he left I turned to my bandmates and said, "That wasn't him. I swear it wasn't him." It turns out that this guy would find his way backstage with all these bands by saying that. We wound up running into the real Darius in Nashville about a week later and we told him. He was . . . slightly amused [laughs].

Another example would be someone pretending to be blind in order to come backstage, and when they get backstage you realize that they're not. There's a humor to what happens behind the scenes that is often overlooked -- I think there's a preconceived notion that people who are in the public eye are very much fawned over, so it's fun and healing to show people that a lot of times the most famous person in the room can feel like the most invisible one.

Have you ever gone out of your way to meet someone you admired?

I'm usually tongue-tied when I meet authors. I'll run into someone who wrote a book that I love, and I can't speak and my cheeks are all flushed and I'm reduced to being an eight-year-old. Those are the people that I admire the most.

How do you feel about Jagged Little Pill a decade later?

I love it. I went back into the studio with [producer/collaborator] Glen Ballard, and I just finished the vocals [for the acoustic version]. It's going to come out ten years to the day it was originally released, which was June 13, 1995.

After Jagged Little Pill, people painted you as angry. Do you feel you were misrepresented?

No, I think it spoke more to the fact that women being rage-filled was not something that was easily accepted or embraced. I had been told that it was OK for me to be happy and friendly and poised, but it was not OK to be enraged or blaming or victim-y. So because I had repressed it in myself for so long, when it came time to write songs from a stream-of-consciousness place, that which had been sitting on the backburner came out with a vengeance.

Why do you think that was the facet of the album everyone picked up on?

If we were as OK with anger as we are with someone smiling in our culture, people wouldn't have even noticed. They would've said, "Oh, there's a lovely record." But because rage is such a taboo emotion -- and often a misunderstood one -- it was understandable that everyone freaked out.

What other projects are you considering?

I think I have a book in me. Having been so freaked out about my bouts of depression and everything that I've experienced, I've actively sought out different ways to turn to my innate joy. There's been many different workshops and books and journaling and artistic expression that I've done that I would love to put into one book and share with people.

Congratulations on your U.S. citizenship. Do you feel it came a few months too late in light of the election?

Yeah, no shit [laughs]! Although one vote wouldn't have made a difference. I actually asked people to vote on my behalf, which probably got a few more votes than had I just done it myself.

Being a twin myself, I have to ask about your connection to your brother.

Inexplicable. It was the bane of many romantic relationships in my life because a lot of times I would compare my boyfriends to him: "Do I have the connection that I have with my twin?" Which is a really tall order [laughs]. That was a companionship that I had throughout all my youth, so it took a minute or two to really get a sense of my own individual identity.

You seem to know who you are.

I don't know if I can fully achieve self-actualization while I'm here in the physical form, but I think I'm on a really great journey toward it.

JESSICA ROBERTSON, Rolling Stone
(Posted Mar 24, 2005)

Arcade Fire

Four funerals and a wedding

Arcade Fire's debut LP is all about death. Why does it sound quite so happy, wonders Dave Simpson

Friday March 11, 2005
The Guardian

Win Butler and Regine Chassagne look nonplussed. Their band, Arcade Fire, is winning praise from every corner. David Bowie has already seen them play three times, and has declared their debut album, Funeral, his favourite record of the past 12 months. David Byrne joined them on stage after hearing that they did a cover of his Talking Heads song This Must Be the Place. In Britain, critics have declared Funeral "a masterpiece". Now Butler and Chassagne are fending off offers of up to $1m from record companies - even though they managed to make Funeral for just $10,000.

"I'm pretty sure we'd make a terrible record for $1m," says Butler. He'd much rather downplay all the attention. "This is our first record, so it's a bit weird. It makes me suspicious. A lot of the stuff we like gets panned." He raises a sliver of a smile. "So maybe we're doing something wrong."

There may not be anything wrong, but there is definitely something very odd about Arcade Fire. The name comes from a story a friend told Butler and Chassagne about an inferno that claimed the lives of several children. (Butler insists that it probably wasn't true: "I've no evidence it happened, although things like that do, everywhere.") More strangely, they have made a giddy, atmospheric, curiously uplifting album about death. Real death. At least three family members died while the album was being recorded; some articles on the band have placed the body count as high as nine.

Sitting in a cafe in London, Butler and Chassagne betray little of the euphoria of their music. She is tiny, almost silent but prone to eruptions of excitement. He is a giant, and has the dry, quiet manner of an undertaker. Perhaps this is what happens when you make an album about private affairs and emotions and then are faced with the task of repeatedly talking about it in public.

"The songs were written before [the deaths], so there's not a one-to-one correlation," says Butler. Bowie told the pair that the album contained a mysterious "something else", but when I remind them of this it prompts one of Chassagne's eruptions. She'd hate it, she says, if people thought the band were freaky: "We're not the Addams family."

Chassagne's parents are from Haiti, but fled the country and "Baby Doc" Duvalier's murderous regime for the safety of Montreal before she was born. She met Houston-born Butler in 2000. At the time, she was playing medieval music in a band with recorders ("We played weddings, but not funerals") and he was studying Genesis - the first book of the Bible, not the Phil Collins band. "It wasn't the most popular major," Butler deadpans, "but it is the basis of western civilisation so I thought it'd be kinda interesting."

Butler had seen Chassagne singing at an art exhibition and made it clear he was, as he slyly puts it, "interested in collaborating". The relationship blossomed at the same time as the music. Butler was into Dylan, Leonard Cohen and New Order and had already been in a band called the Sleep; for Arcade Fire, the pair also called on Butler's brother Will and multi-instrumentalists Richard Parry and Tim Kingsbury. From the start they were raising eyebrows in Montreal, not only for the music on their demo tape, but because they performed alongside an electrified Christmas reindeer that they bought from K-Mart. Everything was going swimmingly - and then people started dying.

The first was Chassagne's grandmother, in June 2003. "She'd been sick for a long time," she says. "She had Parkinson's. She was mentally there but not physically. She'd say 'Come on, why don't you take me?' So it was kind of refreshing when she died." Butler and Chassagne married two months later, went to Trinidad and Tobago for their honeymoon and began recording. Then Butler's grandfather, Alvino Rey, died at the age of 95. In his life a famous bandleader, Rey is still with the band in a sense: My Buddy, a track he recorded in the 1940s, appears on the B-side of Arcade Fire's first UK single. "It was kind of a tribute," says Butler. "He'd grown up with Duke Ellington and when rock'n'roll came out in the 50s he felt the world was ending. But towards the end of his life I heard him say: 'Bruce Springsteen's music's bad but he's a great performer.' So he would have appreciated us ... a bit."

A month later, Parry's aunt Betsy died. By this point, the band were flitting between the recording studio and the funeral parlour. Nor is this likely to be the last death: Butler's other grandfather - also 95 - is currently in hospital. "He was playing tennis until a year ago and he wanted something for the back pain. The doctor explained that they could give him cortisone but that there'd be long-term effects. He said: 'I'm 95! I'm not worried about long-term effects!'" Butler bursts into laughter at the thought.

It would have been easy for the album to wallow in depression, but instead the music has something of Butler senior's defiance of death and lust for remaining life. "If people find it uplifting that's great," he says. "That's better than saying it's sad bastard music. I listened to my share of early Cure." He plays down the effects the deaths have had on their sound, pointing out that deaths happen around everyone. But not, surely, with this level of frequency? "One of the first short stories I wrote in school was just after my grandma died and I went to her funeral," he finally admits. "I guess being exposed to death at that age has an effect."

A permanent sense of loss may explain the eerie vibe of lyrics such as "ice has covered my parents' eyes". Chassagne explains that the line "if all the stillborns formed an army" in Une Année Sans Lumière refers to "all the babies killed and generations lost, compliments of Duvalier". The character in The Backseat is her mother, another dearly departed. However, some lines must remain shrouded in mystery, such as: "Alexander, our older brother, set out for adventure, got bit by a vampire, we caught his tears in a cup." "Some things are best left unknown," says Chassagne. "It's like if you look at a gem or a mirror. If you turn it around you'll see different things, different flashes."

Butler cheerily asserts his belief in some form of afterlife, pointing out that people are such specific personalities that it's hard to imagine it all going to nothing. One thing we won't see again, however, is the electric reindeer. "We had to leave it somewhere," he says with a sigh. "It died."

· Funeral is out now on Rough Trade. The single Neighbourhood 2 (Laika) is released on March 28.

Useful links : Arcade Fire official site ==> Arcade Fire

Lavigne

Avril Lavigne : Under My Skin


Originally released: 2004 BMG Entertainment

Avril Lavigne conquered the pop charts by refusing to get dirty. No skimpy clothes, no suggestive dancing, no tabloid adventures, no hip-hop collaborations, no provocative lyrics. She was both more defiant and more clean-cut than her peers: Her just-say-no message intrigued millions of kids while reassuring their parents.

But Avril Lavigne might also be the most inscrutable teen-pop star of all time. For the past couple of years, her army of Avrilites has been staring at her, eagerly and hungrily, and she has stared right back, betraying nothing. Even now, after the years-long media blitz that followed the extravagant success of her debut, Let Go, Lavigne still seems somehow unsullied by it all: a nineteen-year-old blank slate.

That blankness is what makes her best songs so irresistible. Whether it's a fit of faux punk or a maudlin ballad, she sings it all absolutely straight: You can hear whatever you want to hear. Her music is maddeningly (and admirably) difficult to categorize: The hit "I'm With You" had an almost imperceptible country twang, a vaguely new-metal melody and a chorus that wouldn't be out of place on American Idol, though none of the contestants would have had the good sense to sing it so plainly.

For her new album, Under My Skin, Lavigne split with Matrix, the team that wrote much of Let Go. Working with an unlikely crew of songwriters -- her guitarist Evan Taubenfeld and the Canadian singer-songwriter Chantal Kreviazuk -- she put together an album that's both more satisfying and more formulaic. Lavigne doesn't incorporate any new ideas on Skin; instead, she shines up her old ones, often multitracking her voice to make sure you don't miss the mile-wide choruses. The lead single, "Don't Tell Me," might be her most Avril-ish song yet, a petulant kiss-off to a horny boy. As the guitars get revved up behind her, she asks, "Did I not tell you that I'm not like that girl/The one who gives it all away, yeah/Did you think that I was going to give it up to you?" The syntax may be tortured, but the singer sounds just fine: a righteous prude, confidently fending off the creeps.

There's nothing here like "Nobody's Fool," the anomalous hip-hop experiment from Let Go. What hasn't changed is her meticulous delivery: She pronounces every syllable individually, avoiding the slurred consonants and distended vowels that singers often use to convince us that their lyrics mean something. All Lavigne delivers is the words and the tune, and it's often enough.

Some of the ballads are a bit vague, and Lavigne's deadpan approach doesn't help. In "How Does It Feel," she asks, over and over again, "How does it feel to be/Different from me?" You get the feeling she doesn't much care about the answer. Still, no one conjures up bored teenage blankness like Avril Lavigne. The album's best song, a raucous three-minute sprint called "He Wasn't," has a pretty vacant opening line ("There's not much going on today/I'm really bored") and a simple yet ambiguous chorus: "He wouldn't even open up the door/He never made me feel like I was special." The words are full of contempt and self-pity, but she sings them like she doesn't really care.

KELEFA SANNEH

The Tracks:

1 Take Me Away

2 Together

3 Don't Tell Me

4 He Wasn't

5 How Does It Feel

6 My Happy Ending

7 Nobody's Home

8 Forgotten

9 Who Knows

10 Fall To Pieces

11 Freak Out

12 Slipped Away