Finally answering the question no one had thought to ask: what if General Public were really shitty?

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Arcade Fire is still around? Stopped listening after The Suburbs...

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Yeah, this shit's dire. Pitchfork had another Black Kids-esque mea culpa, dinged it with a 5.9 (Pitchfork basically grades on an 8-9 scale these days so that's really bad) after crapping out endless promotion for this album. This graf really gets to the heart of why Arcade Fire sucks so bad now:


This was the worst possible band to become more or less a captured shop of LCD Soundsystem.

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Funeral was probably the last great first-listen album for me. I cherish that moment in time.

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Sex isn't dirty, sex isn't a crime. It's a loving act between two or more consenting adults.

-Hank Kingsley

Hearing Rebellion/Lies on the Lolla feed was GLORIOUS.

Think I will pass on the new material.

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Sex isn't dirty, sex isn't a crime. It's a loving act between two or more consenting adults.

-Hank Kingsley

It's so bad. I can't even articulate how bad "Chemistry" is. This was a band whose whole catch was that they were balls-to-the-wall passionate and earnest, now matter how awkward or stupid it made them look, and now all they do is mumble over James Murphy beats. Each album has been worse than the last, and the decline is steeper each time. I can't think of another band that fell this far. Interpol, maybe? But Interpol was never really that good.

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So you don't have to:

I was already familiar with the title track from XRT playing it and having to pretend it doesn't suck. It sounds like ABBA but without being catchy. At one point the piano/string arrangement drops out to just a pan flute and sounds a little like a bad Peter Gabriel experiment. You know, Hercules & Love Affair already did the whole "what if disco didn't suck?" thing back in 2008 and just as I type that out I realize that's the other 2000s indie band that went headlong off a cliff.

"Signs of Life" is a Daft Punk song about "those cool kids" who get drunk and fuck to convince themselves they're alive. (Maaaaaan.) Ring the Win Butler "kids" bell! I think Daft Punk was actually involved in the album; if they were, they should have saved this for themselves and put mindless lyrics over it.

"Creature Comfort" is basically the same but reeeeaaally boring. There are some industrial-ish synths and a really slow beat behind some piano stuff that sounds like The Suburbs The lyric "some girls hate their bodies, stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback" is the Mick Jagger-Morrissey-Jezebel.com collaboration we were all waiting for. Regine shrieks "on and on I don't know if I want it" and even by Regine-shrieking standards dealing with this is a big ask. This song is 4:42 and I can't finish. The song may end with the guitar solo from Stairway but you and I will never know.

"Peter Pan" sounds like something the Fiery Furnaces rejected, and the Fiery Furnaces were not a band known for their exacting self-editing.

I will try to describe how bad "Chemistry" is. Remember the "Da Da Da" song from the old Volkswagen spots? Okay, it's that, but reggae with a little Young Americans Bowie sprinkled into it the way you might sprinkle a little bleach into ammonia. And remember how Tom Servo says "nice song, but I think it needs a hook" during the "Idiot Control Now" scene in Pod People? Add that. This song is a murder weapon. It's only 3:33 but feels like an eternity. This band made "No Cars Go" once.

"Infinite Content" is like one of those Magnetic Fields tossoff tracks where Stephen Merritt amuses himself with loud noise and a bad pun. Here it's shouting "INFINITE CONTENT, INFINITE CONTENT, INFINITELY CONTENT" over some forgettable guitar clatter. Now it hits me: Win Butler literally just read Infinite Jest like six months ago and thought he was doing God's work by putting it to music. But at least in Infinite Jest, the media that killed everyone had the decency to say "I'm sorry." This album will kill me with no apology.

It gives way to "Infinite_Content" with an underscore, and now it's a country-western version of the same stupid song you just heard! jfc at least Magnetic Fields joke tracks are only laid down once! There's no "Punk Love Revisited"!

"Electric Blue" is a Regine track to the extent that it's not really a James Murphy track and features a chorus of "lalalalalala." It's the first song that doesn't make me angry.

"Good God Damn" sounds like a Reflektor b-side and has that Gang of Four/Wire guitar style that always gets called "angular." It's not terrible!

"Put Your Money on Me" has little square-wave beeping beneath some plaintive disco-ish vocals but it never goes anywhere. The next/final track is 6:18 and that's where I nope out on the rest of this concept-post. Enough of this stupid ironic hipster bullshit. Stop inventing elaborate p.r. campaigns and just make good songs again, geez.

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Rolling Stone gave it 4 stars. Told me all I needed to know about this album.

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Whoa whoa whoa, lets not say things we can't take back...

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team Mully & Hanley
team Meatpants

After one listen, I agree that's it's not good, but I do enjoy creature comfort, it's a good driving song? Maybe? I did enjoy INTERPOL's latest release... a few years ago, but they lost a strong part of the band when Carlos the wield bassist left...

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team Mully & Hanley
team Meatpants

Regine reminds me of that chick in Matt and Kim.
They both seem like they sweat from their armpits a lot.

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Just chillin' like Garret Quillin.

I get where you're coming from. I've thought to myself that Karen O must smell atrocious.

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Never understood any of the Arcade Fire hoopla. Will admit I still like Intervention though.

I agree pretty much with most of CH's review. I am sure this is for somebody just not sure who.

Their debut was the right thing at the right time: it was passionate and earnest music, unlike the Strokes or Franz Ferdinand, that fit into the alternative/indie idiom, unlike the mall emo shit of the mid-2000s. And it was honestly a great album that's as good now as it was then. Win Butler has always been a bit of a moon-faced doofus but it worked within their original dance-like-no-one's-watching approach. Now that he thinks he's a brilliant and cool social critic, he's insufferable.

I really really like Funeral, if you can't tell.

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I definetly missed that era. I was put off by everything and never really listened to them until way after the fact. Ughhh the names Strokes and Franz Ferdinand give me the shivers.

Funeral is great and Neon Bible is charming. The Suburbs was even pretty good.

Then the change happened.

G
A
Y

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What are your feelings on LCD Soundsystem? I really liked a lot of Sound of Silver but was never 100-percent on board with Murphy's genius status, and everything thereafter (both his own stuff and his hijacking of Arcade Fire) confirmed I was right.

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I used to really not like This Is Happening (except All I Want, which is great), but I've grown to like it a lot more the last few years. Maybe its the live versions of some of the songs, like You Wanted a Hit sucks on the album but is great on the live record, but whatever. I at least appreciate it.

Sound of Silver has one of the greatest songs ever on it, and a couple other monster jams too (New York... and Someone Great are both awesome) but if you want me to find the real overrated album that's it. My favorite song of theirs has always been Never As Tired As Whem I'm Waking Up...I wish they kept that direction more. Its maybe the least LCD Soundsystem song in LCD Soundsystem's entire catalog.

"Drunk Girls" is all I really like from This Is Happening, even if it's basically a rewrite of "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House." American Dream did nothing for me. But I never understood the god status he got from the indie press, and he was about the worst possible style clash the Arcade Fire could ask for.

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Oh I understand it. He was a New York boy (raised in New Jersey, but he wont tell you that). He had been around DJing shows and heading up the scene there for years before he made those records. He made a few songs about how cool his parties were, and the cool people who liked his cool parties of course liked the cool songs about the cool parties that made them feel even cooler themselves, so he got incubated. He was one of the tastemakers, and once he realized that role could allow him to make his own music at the top of every playlist...well it was all over. All LCD Soundsystem albums kind of suck. Listening to them all the way through blows.

But they have great songs. Some absolutely amazing songs. His status is not without merit.

This is Happening is (mostly) fantastic.....it's ok to have emotion and lyrics in JM's songs.
I love most of LCD's albums, though the American Dream is just ok...a little too sleepy for my taste.
Sound of Silver is really, really great, but I actually like This is Happening better.

I'm not an over the top arcade fire fan, but there is a correlation between not liking their newer stuff and not liking most of LCD Soundsystem's stuff.
I mean, the Butler brothers still had the final say in how the albums turned out.

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I did what I usually never do and listened to Funeral in the summer to remember how good it was and it's still so good, right from the first seconds. What a long way down.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru4T3m48o5Y

Just found out about this. Why did this happen?

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Damn, I thought the YouTube comments would be funnier....