San Diego Serenade: Arcade Fire Live At The Casbah 1/17/05

coachella dvd

I watched the Coachella DVD that my parents were kind enough to send me for a birthday present last night. It's an interesting DVD. There are plenty of good artists, the Flaming Lips and Bright Eyes deliver notable performances, but on the whole it feels like a wierd movie whose existence I have trouble justifying. It is culled from multiple years at the festival, so it sort of waters down the "We were there!" appeal of single event concert movies. The artists are also incredibly diverse, meaning some of them are very bad, and with artists such as Radiohead lurking later in the movie, Bjork and Fisher Spooner probably didn't get my full attention (they were skipped within ten seconds.) I am even more surprised because this movie also had a theatrical release, which seems hubristic and arrogant or the producers. Coachella has just never seemed like that notable of an event. Looking at a festivals lineup should make you lament the fact that there's no way in hell you could justify traveling to Europe or Tennesee for it, not make you think, "Man, if someone gave me free tickets to that, I wonder what the traffic would be like up to Indio..." (seriously, for what? Tool? Depeche Mode? Matisyahu? Madonna? Common? James Blunt? Bloc Party? The only good thing about festivals this big is that the overlap would mean you would have to miss some of these acts. Only slightly worse is thinking that Street Scene pretty much can't possibly be as good as Coachella.)

But nevertheless, the DVD did have a cool purpose, and that was to re-spring the Arcade Fire on an unsuspecting me. Their sunset performance of "Rebellion (Lies)" was definitely one of the highlights, and it confirmed that the band has been the rarest kind of hype transcender, the kind where when you hear one of their songs out of the blue months after you stopped listening to them daily, you remember how good they sounded at the peak of your fan-ship and want to listen to them all over again. That's pretty much everything I want from a band: for them to be good enough to listen and love them until you can't take it anymore, and then you hear them for the first time in five months and start it all over again.

The Arcade Fire at Coachella

The Arcade Fire played at the Casbah last January, and it was the kind of show where the tickets were 10 dollars, our friends in New York had seen them, and the hype was inescapable. I bought the tickets and sort of forgot about the commitment, and a few days before the concert I still hadn't given the record the proper pre show listens. Then, at some point in time, "Wake Up" played at just the right time, and I realized that this was absolutely going to be the show opener, and that there was no way the show wasn't going to be awesome. This was an accurate assesment, and as the band left the stage I found myself thinking that this was the rare kind of show where if they announced that they were going to play it all over again, from start to finish, I would probably have stayed. Then they played the encore and I seriously thought about changing my answer. After the ridiculously intense closer of Neighborhood #3 -> Rebellion (Lies), they encored with two songs that the singer's wife sung, or warbled, complete with interpretive dance antics out of an SNL sketch. I seriously didn't know if I could have taken the double dose of "Haiti" and "In The Back Seat" even for all the "Wake Up"'s in the world. But oh well. Here's the show, enjoy it, and think about how much awesomer it would have been to see them at the Casbah the next time they come to play like the UCSD arena or some other awful spacious venue.

1. Intro
2. Wake Up
3. Neighborhood #2 (Laika)
4. No Cars Go
5. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
6. Crown Of Love
7. Cars and Telephones
8. Born On A Train (Magnetic Fields Cover)
9. Une Annee Sans Lemiere
10. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
11. Rebellion (Lies)
12. Encore Break
13. Haiti
14. In The Back Seat