Episode 3: Tim Miller / Arcade Fire

And hello again everybody, welcome into political beats. A presentation of National Review, and this is the show where we talk to a whole lot of people in politics, working in commenting on, reporting on the world of politics, but of course we don't talk to them about anything having to do with politics whatsoever. We are merely interested in what makes their heart go a flutter when talking about music and bands and artists. My name is Scott Bertram, and my co-host Jeff Lair standing by.

Hey Jeff. Hey Scott, how are you? I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am for today's episode. I've been waiting for this one.

Like Phil Collins might have said in the air tonight, for all of my life. We will tell you, if you haven't checked out Twitter recently, what the band is in just a moment. A reminder you can subscribe to this fine podcast for new episodes through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or Tune in. This is our third episode.

You can go back, find old ones with Sean Trendy and Van Halen, an episode to Robert Costo, the Washington Post, and Dave Matthews Band. And today we are very pleased to have with us Tim Miller, former Jeb Bush 2016 and communications director, co-founder of America Rising, partner at Definers Public Affairs. You can find him on Twitter at TimODCTim. Thanks so much for joining Political Beasts.

Hey Scott and Jeff, I'm really pumped to do this. Thanks for having me. And before we get to the band, we want to know a little bit more about you Tim. What is your political beat?

What's your political job? What do you do during the day when you're not listening to music? I've basically been with the campaign Jip D for about 15 years. You said no to me as a communications director, but I was a flak for a lot of establishments Republicans, if you will, out of Vogue these days.

And currently I'm a partner at the Finders Public Affairs. We do corporate communications and also dabble in some political work still as well, with Matt Rhodes, who was a Romney's campaign manager and mother business partner as Joe Pounder, who was a research director at the RNC. We have a specialty in opposition research, which is fun stuff. Absolutely.

Now, dark arts. You can't write a profile about it without mentioning the dark arts. That's mandated. Usually I would be the one here to kind of intro the band and tell people what we're going to be talking about, but this is so close and so near and dear to the heart of our beloved Jeff Blair.

I turn this responsibility over to you, Jeff. Tell us what we're talking about today. Well, the band that we are talking about today is at least in my own benighted soul opinion, probably the most interesting, if not the most interesting, at least one of the most interesting and most relevant American or North American, depending on how you characterize them, rock groups of the last 17 years, certainly of the 2000s and of the current 10s, whatever you would call that as a decade. It's a band that played a fundamental role in the founding and the popularization of the so-called indie rock scene of the 21st century, and it's a band that really still believes in the power and the importance of albums as actual statements, and of music, melody, and lyrics as a sort of united front where they all come together and mean something, and should be consumed, combed over, thought about, and actually will play a role, some kind of important role in your life.

Of course, what am I talking about? I'm talking about the monkeys. No, I'm talking about Arcade Fire, Arcade Fire, the band that was based out of Montreal, although they have since relocated to points for the south. This is a favorite band of mine, and it's a band that I am very pleased that Tim Miller here has decided to join us to discuss about.

So Tim, I guess what we would like you to do is, before we continue further onward, is tell us, why is Arcade Fire one of your favorite bands? Why is it a group that you wanted to talk about today? What have they meant to you? Sure, I'm happy that you asked about Arcade Fire, because like you said, they're so unique and going to be so fun to talk about.

So tell us a full reason about my appreciation for Arcade Fire, I've got to back up a little bit to before the days where I listened to music, the cool kids listened to, and how I got into music was by listening to Jambans, I'm from Colorado. So in high school and college, I followed around a band called Widespread Panic, basically a southern version of Fish. You're talking to us like we don't know who Widespread Panic is to call. I would never, I would not dare, obviously you guys know about the relevance of Widespread Panic.

The great thing about Panic was, or if you got into any Jambans as an intro to music was they wore their influences on their sleeves, and it was just such a good intro for me to learning about classic rock bands, but Jeff listened to not the ones that are on the radio, for the blues and jazz and country and the other artists they'd cover. So as I came out of college and into my political career, unfortunately I did not have the time on my hands to travel around following a band, on a parking lot grilled Jesus. And so I think what you found is for those of us, my peers who really were into the music and were moved by the music of these sorts of bands, a lot of us kind of gravitated towards more of the artsy rock and indie rock bands of the era, and that takes us to the mid-offs, and so it should not be surprising to you that the ones that we gravitated to most were Arcade Fire, LCD Sound System, the White Stripes, the Stroke, bands of that nature that were the relevance as Jeff said, rock bands of the time. So it was about the end that Arcade Fire had, they'd just come out with Funeral, obviously, and Neon Bible was a little bit in the future.

They did a stint on the Dark with the Night, which was a collaboration album with a bunch of indie bands that was right around the time that I was really getting into this kind of music, that a brilliant song called Linen on that that I highly recommend. And you know, that's what I'm talking about. Oh, is that true? Give us one song cut from Funeral.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, it's really phenomenal. And so, you know, we would, at a more leisurely pace than I did with Panic, you know, travel to see bands of the nature. We'd talk about some of those shows in Brooklyn with Ramones and Coachella and Haban and Coachella and elsewhere.

But I just think that a band like Arcade Fire that has, in a sense, you know, you wouldn't call them, I guess, jamming per se, but they do, you know, with between the longer tracks, the types of people that were attracted to the music. I don't think it should be a surprise that that was not a natural evolution for me and my musical interest. And I think that Arcade Fire, you know, I really sort of remember and, you know, I'm emotionally connected to the band that I first found in that, you know, in the sort of in the vein. And, you know, obviously that was Arcade Fire and with Rebellion and all the various neighborhood tracks on Funeral were one.

So always having emotional connections. Well, you know, it's funny how Tim came at this from a jam band perspective. I came at it from a very weird kind of hermetic musical shut-in perspective. I used to never be a guy who went to see live acts.

Ironically, the first time I ever saw Arcade Fire live was in 2004, I believe the summer of 2004. This is before Funeral came out. And then the second time I ever saw them was like three weeks ago. Chicago, when they played, you know, right before the Lava Palooza.

And so I long-capped in between and what, of course, their existence, the experience of them for me has been since then. It's been hearing the studio albums, picking up the piece size, the obscurity is listening to the live performances. Of course, YouTube changed everything so you can go watch all their shows. But I, you know, when Tim says he said, you know, he points out how it's a little odd in some ways that people who like jam bands would respond to something like Arcade Fire, which aren't a jam band.

It isn't really strange at all because it's the intensity of their live performances. I wasn't sure whether I would tell this little anecdote, but I guess I will. The first time I ever saw them was in, as I said, June of 2004. And why was I there?

I was there because a friend of mine from college who moved to Toronto had seen them when they were playing in Toronto in 2003, like really early. I think it was their touring their EP or something like that. And he bought the EP in the lobby after the show. He bought two copies of it.

He kept one copy for himself and what did he do with the second copy? He didn't give it to me. He gave it to some girl he was trying to sleep with. But he burned a CD of his own version for me and mailed that to me.

So I respect him enough for that. So when they finally showed up to DC, there was a third build act on a Canadian rock scene that comes to Washington DC to where they played at some small club called the Black Cat. This is your loop, three cred. The thing is, I wasn't there when they got big.

The funniest thing about it is that they came out. I was interested because I like that EP. It was a good EP. Okay, you know what I can do.

Let's have a couple beers and then go. They came out. The new four-nows or something? They were truly the Unikomons.

Does anybody remember the Unikomons? Yeah, sure. And I think Death From Above was the second build act. So they were the first build act.

They were the opening gig. They came on stage. I had heard the EP and I had to listen to it before we came in and I was expecting, well, okay, I might be able to play this stuff. The first song they played was this incredibly angry number.

It was like, he was spinning the audience with Fury. It was incredibly intense. I think Will Butler was wearing a crash helmet and he was banging on the head of another guy. I might have been Richard Reid-Perry.

I can't remember. I was drunk. It was an incredibly forceful performance. They spit the words out.

They spit the music out. And when they finished with that opening song, it bombed. It bombed like you've never seen anything bomb before in your life. Nobody responded.

There was like a smattering of claps. Basically, in difference, people were getting their drinks. Nobody gave a flying F about this band. And that song that they played was Wake Up.

Which was the most important song. Arcade fires in their career. I was reading a couple profiles before we did this. One of my favorite anecdotes from this profile was when said that Wake Up was initially an angry f***ing youth song.

I didn't even know that. That makes so much sense. It was an interesting thing. It was an interesting thing.

It was like, hey, attention to us. Wake up, we have something to say. And you'll be listening to that. I was involved with that to now kind of this thing that's sort of joyous celebration too.

So I heard that album and I heard that concert. I was like, okay, well, this is pretty interesting. It was interesting audience confrontation. If nothing else but the intensity of that live performance came through.

Even then, you know, like, Regine Chassan, who's, Wind Butler's wife, you know, brought out, you can't see me right now. But I'm doing this arm motion, like the breaststroke to represent what it looks like to play an accordion. She brought out the accordion for this. No cars go.

Which even then they were playing. And it was like really intense. There was violence. Everyone was just getting involved.

And it felt to me like the closest analogy I could think of as an actual live act or an instrumental ensemble was the band. Which is strange because the band of course played, you know, country rock if you can call it that or some sort of weird folk country hybrid. But it was the same sort of, we were switching off instruments. Nobody has a committed role.

We just do what matters. We get to the instrument that we need to play to make the music work. And the intensity and emotional commitment is there 100% every second of the time they're on stage. And I stayed with it.

And then eight months later, the same friend who gave me that first EP. So they, you know, they released an album. And that album was funeral. And nothing was ever the same after a funeral came out for me.

Because that was a guy who was kind of not really into most modern music. Although I dabble and I kept myself up to date. Radiohead was of course my big jam. When I heard funeral, I was like, this is the emotional load stone for me.

24 years old, kind of suburban kid myself. These songs about growing up in neighborhoods. It's not urban hipsterism. It's deeply sincere.

But it's really emotionally kind of put together. And the musical craftsmanship is so, so considered. I had kind of convinced myself at that point that bands like this didn't exist anymore. That they were too uncool to exist.

And so when I watched them slowly ascend in popularity and kind of become big over time, I felt grateful for the fact that they were. And they also kind of felt a little bit like I was being robbed of a private experience. This was my group. You know, this was my emotional private zone.

And now everyone else was liking them. And Pitchfork was praising them. And it's strange how you get angry about these things when you're a young person. But anyways, I mean, I would like to know, first of all, Tim, how did you first encounter funeral?

I'm pretty sure that I first encountered funeral on right in the time I was telling you about after I got to college and working my ass up on campaigns, trying to keep fresh in music. I had a couple of musical friends who would send me CDs. I'm old, right? Gosh, I made a lot of out of space with that sound.

And rebellion was on. And I mean, man, like you said, what a just a full and joyous sound. I mean, I think that with music it's funny. The people who are attracted to indie rock broadly, if we're going to stereotype, you know, are kind of ironic, detached.

And a lot of these bands carry the same, you know, carry themselves in that way. And there's an appeal to that. But funeral, after a billion, I went out and got, you know, down with the whole album. Funeral is though the opposite of that, right?

So you're saying, I mean, they are earnest in their exuberance on the album. And there's an appeal to that as a departure from kind of the, you know, ironic me in of the other, you know, of other indie rock bands. And so I managed to do it in a way, and I'm sure we ought to talk about this on the other album. It's not cloying, right?

And you want to be able to appreciate that earnestness and really, you know, be able to yourself experience it. And a lot of, you know, some of the reasons why people are attracted to New York aren't attracted to pop bands, right? There's a lot of them doing it in a way that is kind of off-putting, right, or forced. And that was not the case on that record.

I think, I think, exemplified by, obviously, you know, the neighborhood songs and when Wake Up, The Off the Bajeidee, which was, you know, Bruce, there's a regime song about where she's from. And that was so, you know, earnest and extreme. Political Beats is the podcast presentation of National Review. I'm Scott Berthram, he's Jeff Blair, our guest this week.

Tim Miller, former Jeb Bush 2016 Communications Director, co-founder of America Rising, and current partner at Definer's Public Affairs. We're talking about Arcade fire. These two guys, fans for a long time. And I tell you, I come at this from the perspective of someone who is new to the band.

I knew of Arcade Fire and never dove into them. I think one of the main reasons is a number of the touchstones that were used to describe them. We're not like my favorite artists. You know, Bruce Springsteen, especially on the Bible, David Bowie, who loved that.

Guy hate that comparison. Talking heads. Babe. And so I didn't really, I liked them, but they were not my passions, those particular bands.

And so it took me, until this prompting really to explore them deeper. And I think you're right, Tim. Some of those comparisons aren't all that apt. And I got in through funeral.

I went in order, basically. And so funeral was the first album that I took in. And I hate when someone says, you know, it's going to take you three or four listens to it for you to fully appreciate an album. I liked it from the start, but it did take probably three spins until I fully appreciated how good it was.

The neighborhood songs, Crown of Love for Me is a standout track. Yes. That album. That 50s era piano line that goes through like this oasis of very, of sweetness in the rest of the album.

And yesterday I was listening to the car. I found myself having to crank the volume when rebellion came on. That's a song that just, you know, if we were in a normal era of radio play, you know, where their actual still radio stations that played rock tracks and rock artists weren't making country albums all the time to get radio play. Rebellion would have been a song that was on all the time.

That's to me, can be a windows down volume up kind of sing along track that would have been giant on the radio years ago. I mean, the thing about the tracks on Uneral is that you have a trick just from a songwriter perspective and I have spent a lot of time playing music, writing music, bad music mind you, and singing and performing it. What I love so much about Funeral as an album is that it is so mature in terms of its songwriting approach. If you've listened to the earlier stuff that Arcade Fire did, their first EP, which I think is very good, but it definitely kind of feels like their prehistory.

And even earlier than that, their early demos where they started off as kind of a kind of hapless, hopeless folk rock band that didn't really have their stuff together. They learned how to put together a fascinating song, a structure of song. There are ten songs on Funeral. Only one of them fades out.

This is for me as a songwriter key. They actually have starts, they have middles, they have endings. They don't ever, the only one that fades out ironically enough is Crown of Love. It goes off into that wonderful disco thing, which is the other thing I want to focus on.

And that first album, they have this really neat trick that they use several times. They use it on Crown of Love, they use it on Unane, San Lumière, which is translated into English. It's a year without light. They use it most famously on Wake Up, which is that halfway through the song, they change it up.

Fingersnap, Curtain Draws, Boom, New Song, New Style, New Idea, they go into a completely different mode. So you can never get too tired of what it is they're doing. And it just has such forethought that it's put into it, that it's stunning. When you hear the first EP in the early demos, and then for them to come out with this thing that sounds like the analogy that I tried to make, the analogy that I try to usually use is, and I think it's a great one, is that in terms of debut albums, funeral, the only thing I can think of to compare it to is REM's Mermanor.

In the sense that these are first albums that don't sound like debut albums, even though they're made by young men and women. They sound like not the beginning of a career, but the culmination of a career because of so much craft and confidence that is put into them. When you have that little break at the end of Crown of Love, where he builds up, he's like, you're the only one, the only one that I can say, and then it goes disco. Bam, and suddenly it's done a summer, you know, and you're in the disco.

What's going on here? And you're like, wow! Wake up, wake up. It starts off as this hard rock track.

And then halfway through, suddenly it's Diana Ross in the Supremes. It is a straight up Motown cop. And I love it. And it suddenly turns through something that's angry and forceful.

Something that has strangely, I don't know how to characterize this, a surpassing grace. It gets this light thing that speaks to a hope, maybe I suppose. A hope for something better and a hope for something higher. And it just conveys that simply through the operation of the music alone.

And that's leaving aside the lyrics. The lyrics of these songs are really kind of compelling in the sense that people weren't writing about. You have the neighborhood tracks. For those who aren't aware, funerals divided fairly squarely into two halves.

The first half are these four songs that are called Neighborhood, one, two, three, and four. They each have subtitles. Tunnels like a power out, seven kettles. And there's one song in the middle of that.

And then the second half is where all the big singles that you may have heard come from. Wake up is obviously one in Rebellion, which we talked about as the other. But the first half is lyrically and thematically devoted to the sorts of things that would end up sort of taking over the band in terms of Win Butler, the lead singer-songwriter of the group, taking over his vision for the next several years. And it's covered in ways that aren't cloying, as Tim says.

The first song is called Tunnels. And it sounds like it was written in the middle of a polar vortex. People climbing out of their windows in the middle of the snow. Their parents are fighting.

They're sadness at home. But we're going to escape. We're going to find a new life. We're going to grow our hair out long and raise our children.

We're going to live a new noble life alone. And the adolescence of it, the immaturity of it is openly acknowledged and get celebrated. And to be able to hit that tone, to strike that very, very specific chord, you have to have a surgeon's ability to just narrow right in there without tripping all over yourself. And messing everything else up.

It could have gone wrong in so many different ways. Like a second song. It's basically about a family member, a brother who wanders off on his own to seek his own fortune. And basically ends up being forsaken by family, by fortune, by God.

And again, the power of that song is impossible to convey unless you are truly able to channel the adolescent power of what it means to be in those situations. But with immaturity and a songwriting ability that speaks to people who have been doing it all their lives, old men. And that's what's so stunning about funeral. The book of Unforfunerold.

I'm glad that you guys both brought up Crown of Love because it isn't right to highlight necessarily on the album from reviews. It's not just the one song you talk to when you listen to on the album. But it is such a perfect Sunday, Sunday scariest song, depressed Sunday afternoon. And they hit it so perfectly to allow you to have an emotional connection with Wayne and Regina.

And your point is that you kind of jumped over to have their first record and as a debut album, how impressive it is. I think that the debut albums that are impressive for me are things that you have to think back on and say, well, you know, where something that now might seem almost cliche, but at the time was so exciting, the first thing. And it's the sound on funeral and on Wake Up is on so many car commercials and movies at this point. And there were so many imitators that Artéfire even joked about themselves that they innovated the millennial loop.

All these songs that were kind of loud and green. And it was, it became very emblematic of what I think about the mid-aut music. And in that sense, it's kind of for me more like, I mean, maybe in the sense of Guns N' Roses debut album, right? It sounds cheesy and cliche now, but was so, you know, new at the time.

Obviously, the parallel of Artéfire got to be the strokes record. But in a way, I think the strokes record was a lot more about kind of rebirth and similar types of music where Artéfire took you to a new place. It's political beach presentation of National Review. You can subscribe to our feed new episodes through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Tune In.

I'm Scott Burnt, on Twitter at Scott Burntram, Jeff Blair at EsotericCD, Tim Miller with us today at Tim ODC. And we're talking about Arcade Fire. Jeff, do you want to slide forward or stand funeral for a little longer? Well, I think we should slide forward.

The one thing I do want to say before we move on is that another thing that impresses me, it always impresses me about Arcade Fire, is that you have the standard husband and wife thing, and what does it call to mind? It calls to mind John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It calls to mind Paul and Linda McCartney. Oh, God, the wife's on the album.

This is going to be a groaner. Wind Butler and Rachin Chissan. That is an equal partnership. On funeral, you have two songs that are sung and presumably written by Rachin that are every bit the equal of everything else that's on that record.

And of course her contributions for every record moving forward, which we'll get to, are on that same level. They are fantastic. She has this one song called Haiti. Rachin Chissan for those who are unaware is actually a French Haitian.

Her family fled Haiti during the Duvalier years in the 60s. And it has a sort of light bouncy beat. You think it's kind of a frothy disposable track. And then you listen to the lyrics and it's about like fleeing from the death squads, hiding in the forest.

You know, the ghosts of the past will come back to haunt you. And it's like dark. It's so dark. And then you have the opposite.

The last song on the album is maybe, I think, one of the most majestic things Arcade Fire has ever recorded or released. It's a song called In the Backseat. And it's literally her just saying, you know, I love the piece in the backseat. I don't have to try.

I don't have to speak. I can just watch the country side go by. And it captures an image so beautifully of just lying back there and looking out the window and seeing the blur of mountains and hills and green and sky float by or stars for that matter in a way that I just never heard a song do before. And then builds to this majestic, majestic climax.

And she sings like a siren. She has a very high-pitched voice. I think people have impaired her to be York. I think that's a pretty good comparison in terms of her tonality.

The purity sort of, I think about the straight silver lines. I'm wondering, as such a grow attitude that I am totally recognized that I have in myself, which is that fair of a mindset, which is like, oh God, it's the life song, right? Where they come on and you're totally right. That is absolutely the opposite here.

You know, it's worth moving on suburbs a couple albums ahead for all two. The Rijing song is the best thing that they've done. And you know, the other, there is another example of that has happened recently, which is Jason Isbell, who listens to that. And his wife Amanda Shire.

And in a same way, just like Rijing, his records since they've gotten back together and since they collaborated are so much better and richer now. And I think that that is definitely true of winning Rijing in a way that's not about some of those other folks you mentioned. I think of winning Rijing as the happy ending version of Richard and Linda Thompson, which is a fairly obscure folk reference for those who might get it. And if you don't, well, Google Richard and Linda Thompson, good music.

But of course that takes us on to their second album. And here's the thing about Arcade Fire. Their one flaw, if you can call it that, is they make a record approximately once every presidential administration. They take a long time between albums.

So Funeral was released in 2004. They had a lot of hype cycle. It built up. It got big.

The second album, Neon Bible, came out in 2007. This is one that I think there has been a certain amount of backlash towards. But here's my secret confession and I'm going to throw this out there and let anyone else comment on it first. I think I might like it every bit as much as Funeral and maybe even a little more.

For me, I think this might have been the toughest album to understand, to get into, to appreciate. There are some clear highlights. Intervention is an amazing song with that pipe organ and the chimes at the start and the lyrics. Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home.

Intervention is such a great, great song. But Neon Bible took a while for me to get. I would not say it's my favorite. I wouldn't say it's my second favorite either.

But there are some clear highlights. No cars go, which I know we'll talk about here, bringing that back from the EP right near the close. I appreciate artists that know how to close an album. The Rolling Stones, if you look back on their career, they know how to close an album.

Some of their best songs are literally the last track on their big albums. And what I noticed too is Arcade Fire. They know how to close an album. Some of the best tracks in their catalog come in the last track and the last two, three tracks of an album.

And I love that. Yeah, I mean, that's a great point as well. One of my disappointments about this new album. I was waiting for that track at the end.

But as far as the Bible is concerned, you know, it's funny. I have gained much more of an appreciation for it recently. I went back and listened to it a bunch since we decided to do that and kind of forgot how much I liked some of those songs. Like you mentioned, Intervention in particular, the Stand Out, the Well and the Light House.

I think that for me personally, it's that 2007 was maybe the powerhouse year in indie rock. And it was kind of right as I was really, you know, had gotten into it and started to appreciate it. You had Panda Bear, did First and Pitch, did that year, LCD Sound System, did that with Silver. And the M.I.A.

First record came out in rainbows without that year. I absolutely loved. I'm not sure you all, I think, are you the destroyer? It might be one of my five favorite records of the decade, animal collective.

So I kind of feel like I did not, I lost it in the shuffle a little bit that year because it did not have, you know, the track that I wanted to blare at the beach house every night in the same way that the funeral does and that the suburbs reflector does. But re-listening to it now, I think also within the kind of the arc of their albums. I'm with you, Jeff. I've gained a huge appreciation for it.

And I mean, I like it as much as all the others. I mean, I think the criticism people will sometimes lodge, and we even touched on this earlier. The criticism that people lodge against Neon Bible is that it's the album where Arcade Fire has always been abandoned, has been very proud to wear its musical influences right on its sleeve. I mean, literally right on it's hard for that matter.

You're the Motown stuff on Wake Up. There's seven kettles from Funeral Might as well have just been titled, We Really Like Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. Basically, it's My Father's House Redux. But Neon Bible is the one where you really hear a lot of the stuff that they've been listening to reflected back in the music.

So like Black Mirror is the opening song. The only two songs that I think are kind of lesser than the rest. It's basically David Bowie's Suffragette City, the end bit of Suffragette City looped for about three and a half minutes. And it's fairly effective, but it's just like, okay, obviously you guys are listening to the rising poet Ziggy Stardust.

You can hear Bruce Springsteen. I know it's a cliché, but it is true. You can hear his influence all over a lot of these things. Like keep the car running, which is the big single.

I mean, that's a prime one for sure. Yeah, I mean, the addiction on that, it's not even just that. It's also antichrist television blues, which is, by the way, a great song and a fantastically odd lyric that I think is written about, like, Lindsay Lohan's parents or Jessica Simpson's parents, the kinds of parents who have kids who are stars and they kind of exploit them and feel very guilty about it and wonder, well, you know, is this a good thing? But I don't want to live in a crappy job and work in an office downtown for the rest of my life.

And interesting, you can see for a song and it's a great musical track, but it absolutely sounds like something from Born in the USA, or at least maybe an outtake from Born in the USA. And then you have influences that are probably a little more difficult for people who don't have, who are just based on classic rock to understand, no cars go. The rearrangement of no cars go. One of the best songs on that record.

The ending part of that song, where it builds and it builds and it builds and these guitars are just screaming and ball-planning up in the background. It basically sounds like it was influenced by Godspeed, you black emperor, which is a band that I don't know if you even call it a band. It's an anarcho-synticalist musical collective from Montreal. They would probably dismiss arcade fire as being hopelessly bourgeois and terribly obsessed with fame and fortune and terribly obsessed with actual song structure and lyrics.

But Godspeed, you black emperor is a pretty interesting group. I have all their records and they're primarily an instrumental, 16 people in the group. That build up, the screaming build up at the end of no cars go, is a straight tribute to stuff off of Lipschuskinifists like antennas, which is one of Godspeed, you black emperors, greatest albums from 2002. That kind of stuff is found all throughout Neon Bible.

But I don't really think that's a reason. I've just really clicked on that. And that also ties to this kind of what I have for me about my initial experience where it didn't quick with me as much. I don't think in 2007 because it also came out of another record I didn't mention from that year was Boxer by the National, which was just such a, oh, it was a moment, post 9-11 New York rock album that felt very current in the lyrics and the way that they jumped in their career from their past records to a fuller sound.

And that stood out as such a star that year that this insumillates Neon Bible felt not quite as, I guess your point, not quite as current as in the moment as the national and some of those other records did. But listening back to all that stuff now, there's still just such phenomenal moments on it, particularly from the fourth track to the eighth and the middle of the record. So the argument that I would make in favor of Neon Bible is that it's much more, there's wild energy on funeral. Neon Bible is controlled.

And I think it's controlled in a good way. The suburbs, which you like, and I'm not as big of a fan of, is too controlled in my opinion. It's too overthought. But Neon Bible has things like its title track, which is just this kind of weird acoustic thing.

There's some violins playing softly in the background. There's some hum, I guess, amplifier feedback that you hear in the background. It's a very beautiful, tense song. You keep expecting it to explode into some giant revelation, some climax that of the sort you would have heard on Crown of Love for that matter.

And it never does. It just goes boom, boom, boom, soft pulse, and then it just dies. And then intervention, those big organ-like church keys come in, well sequenced record. And then I think it sounds like no cars go.

And I really want to spend some time talking about this. This is a song that they've been playing since 2002. It basically is a thematic re-write of the Beach Boys in my room. You know, hey, when I go into my room, I can be alone with my thoughts, and that's where life is beautiful.

And this is the millennial re-write of it. I know a place where no cars go. It's between the click of the lights and the start of the dream. And then at the end, it builds up into this incredible, powerful, sort of deeply, even just talking about it.

I feel emotional because there's some sort of weird hope that, like, through this music, something greater can be achieved, which we all know as a fantasy. But when you hear it, when you hear that build up, you believe. You believe. And beyond that, you also have stuff like Windows Hill.

Windows Hill is a song that people don't talk about. It's just like, again, kind of that Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska, you know, repetitive acoustic guitar riff that just builds and builds, and then the strings come in. Arcade Fire, of course, has its own sort of homebrew string front line, which is another reason why they're really unique as a band. You have that, you have the Well in the Lighthouse, and then Black Wave, Bad Vibrations.

These are two more kind of two-part songs. There's a lot of variety on that record that I think is under-respected. It's funeral that everyone praises. It's the suburbs that won the Grammy, Reflector is their dance move.

Neon Bible kind of falls between the cracks, but I really don't think it should. Political Beats is the name of the podcast you're listening to. Presentation of National Reviews. Subscribe iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Tune In for new episodes.

Monday mornings. My name is Scott Bertram. Jeff Blair, and Tim Miller is with us this week at Tim O.D.C. from the Jebusch 2016 Communications Director, current partner to Fire is Public Affairs.

We're talking about Arcade Fire, and we'll pivot from Neon Bible to the suburbs, which as Jeff just mentioned, one a Grammy. You alluded to the fact that Tim likes this album a lot. I think if you forced me to choose, I'd probably say the suburbs is my favorite. Album of Arcade Fires as well.

Ah, I don't expect a Grammy. Underserved a Grammy. In your case. The first track, the title track, this kinks like vibe.

I enjoy through some of the album. I like it. I think the vocals are up in the mix a bit, starting with the suburbs. Do a little cleaner, a little clearer, which I don't mind.

And this theme of the suburbs and growing up and escape and finding your place reminds me a lot of another album that I love from probably was a couple years before. But right around the same time, the whole studies, Boys and Girls in America. I think some similar themes in both albums, which are like city with no children, very direct track, guitar, bass, hand claps. I like that one a lot.

Suburban War, you know, holds their, not steady. Arcade Fire is a fan of free to swing and miss, or at least take their swing. Suburban War to me sounds like a big swing and a big hit. I think they got exactly what they were grasping for on Suburban War.

Oh, that's so funny because actually exactly what I think the opposite. That's their big swing and their big miss. So it's controversy. And I'll kind of hand it off to Tim because he had mentioned how much he enjoyed Sprawl 2.

That's just a great track. It would fit on either of the two most recent albums as well, I think. But Sprawl 2 again towards the back end of the album is a great track. And yeah, I think if I'm telling you my favorite arcade fire album, it's probably the Suburbs Tim.

Well, it's just so complete as an album. I'll be interested to hear Jeff rebuttal to that. But as he said, I'd be giving, introducing your musical pass, you said, you know, that you haven't appreciated but the album is an art and so does Arcade Fire in a way that's a lot of the current band. You know, don't do as well.

It's kind of the MP3 universe. We were kind of leaking out single after single. And the entirety for me of the Suburbs is cohesus. The lyrics match the tone of the music and that's what they're trying to say about what it's like growing up in the suburbs.

You really almost could not have lyrics and you could just listen to all these stuff songs with instrumentals. And here's the title of the record of the Suburbs and almost get the point without even hearing what they had to say. But the lyrics are so, you know, they are not, you know, cliche. Like they don't go too far.

You know, they make their point without overdoing it. You know, I think in some ways the ambiguity of them to a casual listener prevents this, as I was saying earlier, from becoming too cloying. And so for me, I just think that it also, the reason why it worked for Hammy, and I couldn't get a tell it last about the crammy, to care. But I think the reason why I connected with the only people is because it hits, you know, right in the nose, you know, this big potential audience.

I mean, this is an experience that a lot of listeners, like their experience is relevant. You know, middle class, white people going up in the suburbs. You know, we don't have to pretend like that's not too archival, right? It is.

And so, you know, they're, you know, feeling and experiences and emotions are relevant. And the archival is nailed by, you know, talking about sort of this desire for authenticity, what BS either, you know, being drawn to, you know, kind of the more rural, authentic life has kind of hit through our cliche, hipster, you know, living in New York, growing our physical foods. And also in the sense I've drawn to the city, you know, the lyrics about, you know, going to see the modern kids, right? And see what the modern kids are doing and try to understand what the cool kids are doing in the city.

There's this element to that on there. I also like it's timeliness, you know, the relevance coming after the, you know, market of 2008. I think that, you know, it speaks to, you know, a lot of experiences people having at that time. One of my favorite lyrics is on the song that Jeff told me on DM that he thought should not be on the album, which is extremely offensive, which is half light too.

It's probably my favorite song on the record. And, you know, they say, you know, we knew that they would come, Dylan took us by surprise. And I think that was, in a sense, that that's true about, you know, kind of leaving, right, the suburbs and growing up and, you know, the feelings are kind of being drawn back to that. You know, it's going to come that, you know, you still have the sense of the pride.

It also is true, I think, of the win and the race, you know, all of us, the hackers and the politicians and the politicians and the people in T.C. Who kind of had the sense that, you know, the economic boom was built on shaky ground, but didn't want to do anything by it and then, you know, were essentially taken by surprise and the results. So I thought it did on all marks. And then I don't know if it's better than funeral, but it's a phenomenal record and well deserved.

Somewhere near the end of the suburbs, there's a song that, to me, embodies everything this album could have been and that I wish it had been, but that it, to my mind at least, isn't. It's called, We Used to Wait. It's just a very kind of simple piano track and you're playing sort of a plaintiff line, a repetitive line. And then, you know, when Butler sings about how, you know, I used to write letters, I used to sign my name, I used to sleep at night before the flashing lights settled into my brain.

He talks about life before technology took over, life before living in a time where we, it was every, it kind of prefigures everything now, if you think about it. It's so moving because I guess maybe it has personal resonance to me, at least. I'm an old man, I'm 36. I remember growing up in like the 80s and early 90s where, you know, I didn't have this immediate access to information to the internet.

I had to write letters. I had, if I wanted to talk to people, I would go get on a landline and sit on the phone on the landline in the kitchen and talk to the girl I really liked. That kind of a thing that immediacy that has been stripped from us through the technological age. I found the very simple, plaintiff way that Arcade Fire wrote about this and then put it into a really beautiful musical track to be moving in a way that so many of the other more obvious plays on the suburbs were not.

Now, when I just put it. One's obvious for you. Which ones are two on the nose? Because I do think this would be my compliment to Arcade Fire that sometimes that I think they put right up against the edge, right?

If you're a band like you two, you know, like I sure I love Joshua Tree, like Acton Baby, but like when you go see them now, you can't even enjoy it, right? Because like Bono will spend 20 minutes giving a speech in the middle of the concert. And so it is just two on the nose, right? To a point that it takes away all of the...

Am I bugging you? Okay, edge, play the blues, right? Because just two on the middle. And some people have that criticism of Arcade Fire.

I think today on the right side of the line, but I'd be curious where you think they met. Here's my thing. I think Arcade Fire had a problem with two part songs and starting with the suburbs. Part songs suites are half baked and I mean that both as a pun and as a literal truth.

That second half, one of the two is usually good and then when it's sort of diatically aligned, then it doesn't work out. So the suburbs and suburban war are basically two halves of the same point. The suburbs is a great song. To me is kind of pleasing glourage.

It doesn't really have much sort of musical or lyrical interest. In fact, it quotes out of the lyrics of the suburbs. It's supposed to sort of have a thematic resonance. So hey, look, we're coming back to this.

But no, Half Light One and Half Light Two. Half Light Two. Okay, I went back and I listened to it a couple of times after we talked before the show about this. It's a good song.

It's not a bad song. Half Light One is garbage. Half Light Two is pretty good. Same with Sprawl One and Sprawl Two.

Sprawl One is two minutes and 57 seconds of prelude. It literally feels like it was written just so there would be a reason to have Sprawl Two with a two behind it. Sprawl Two is one of the best songs that Arcade Fire has ever recorded. Why is Sprawl One even on the album?

They just should have called it Sprawl. That's what I don't understand about this record. I think it's a problem with both the suburbs and the flood. Without the tension building, it's about the on-wheat.

Listen, you can take three minutes and wait. But here's a critical of the suburbs. I want to point out that the first five to six songs on that album are fantastic. Suburbs Ready to Start is a really great rock song.

A modern man is actually one of that. I think maybe my favorite song on that record. It's this really weird little two-step thing where they alternate four four with five four time. You feel like you're out of step with the real world with the modern routine.

People actually, I've seen online make fun of it. They don't like it. This is a song about how horrible it is to stand in mind and wait for things. I'm like, you stupid idiots.

It's a metaphor. Get over it. It's a good point. It's a good thematic point.

You stand in your life, your whole life, and then you end up with nothing. This is not a really difficult conceit to understand. Why do people object to it? If you're a coco, empty room, city with no children.

First, six songs on that record are great. Then there's just a lot of unnecessary stuff that shouldn't be there. Then it ends, of course, with maybe, and I'm going to hand this one over to Tim. Could be one of the greatest songs that Arcade Fire has ever written, which is sprawl two.

Regines? Yeah, I would accept cutting deep blue. I think the album would not lose anything. I think we're having cuts.

Cut deep blue. There may be a little faff in the second half. I'll defend for all one. For the buildup to sprawl two, which is, I guess, the way that I would be able to describe the energy in sprawl two is when I was, it was the closer at Coachella the headline Coachella.

And there's something, you know, bands when they go to Coachella, they're just sort of another level. It is kind of crazy, the scene that you're in. And even a band of the big of Arcade Fire that plays stadium shows, there's something a little bit different about being on the main stage there, and to close the night. And they finish with sprawl two, and in the refrain on the hook each time, when I say, please cut the lights.

I'd wear my memory from that, is that they cut every light in the field that it is. I don't know if what really happened is I closed my eyes, but I had one too many pop. But I mean, that was the power that that is what sticks with me in my memory. That they had such a punch in the face.

And then to combine the musical force with regime lyrics, she's not exactly, you know, act for Rose up there. She is basically singing operatically over it. It's a phenomenal track. It's a song so good that you don't even care that it is obviously, at least instrumentally, a complete rip off of Blondie's Heart of Glass.

And there's this part at the end of it where they go into a little instrumental bit, they modulate up a key, and then regime comes back in with it. They heard me singing and they told me to stop, and it's in a higher key, and she just dives in like a hawk out of the sky. What are you doing? I'm going to do the after show for that.

I'm almost tempted to... It's such a... Yeah, yeah, you know what? You know, you know, you'll know, right?

No. But it's such a transcendent moment, and it is the best moment on it. And here's the thing about that. When I heard the suburbs in 2010, I thought to myself, I said, you know, I kind of feel like I'm worried, like, this is a band I really love.

Are they kind of falling into a rut? Are they kind of repeating themselves? This seems self-consciously a concept album, even though it's one that certainly speaks to my suburban upbringing. And I heard Sprawl too, and I was like, well, you know, I really hope this is the way they go.

This is this, this, this is something new. This is something different. This is the direction. Is there a better indie concept album?

I'm not sure if I would buy the Illinois, but is there anything else that's in the next? I don't know. How about a big fan of In the Airplane over the sea, but a lot of other people would stand up for that one. I love that record.

Well, I don't. King of Care Flowers, my ass, but I'm not a fan of Neutral Milco's album. That said, when I heard Sprawl too, I thought, well, I hope they do this. I had no idea what would happen, and then Reflector came out in 2013, and I could not have been more happy because they actually did.

And they took Sprawl too, and they said, that's the new sound. That's where we go. And they made an entire album out of it. And my God, what an incredible record.

And so I'm going to hand it over to someone else to talk about what I think is one of the best records I've ever had. I'll pop in on this one because, you know, this is produced by James Murphy, the LCD Sound System. And in candor, you know, if I, Jeff got to pick a show, I don't know if you got to tell. It's a different type of arcade fire.

I love arcade fire. But if I was picking my show, I would have done LCD Sound System, which is, you know, I think the king among peers of the kind of indie rock scene. We'll have you back sometime in the future. Yeah, we can argue that.

We can just do an LCD VRK Fire Show next time. But Murphy comes and produces this record. And obviously put this sample out. I think that there were signs of the arcade fire was moving in this direction with a song like Sprawl too.

But the percussion, the dance, the elements, the more the precision on the sound in the way that the record is produced to the pose to kind of a more DIY sound, particularly on the first two records. I guess that's the last one, the case on the suburbs as well. And it's really a tour de force. And I think that what James did was able to produce a dance the arcade fire record.

Right. It didn't, it could have become something where like sounds like arcade fire is imitating. You know, the sound system or other more dance bands. And it didn't sound like that.

The record, you know, maintained, you know, all of the elements of arcade fire, particularly, obviously, I think on here comes the nighttime, which would be, you know, the highlight in that regard that has these sort of. Caribbean beats that, you know, regime in particular like to infuse into into the records and I even got this on the king among some criticism by some of the lefties over cultural appropriation or whatever. But they're so self aware about it. Right.

I mean, they, you know, this is something that they recognize that, you know, that they wanted to, you know, make a sound that kind of, you know, had that same sense that got people foot tapping from their experience going down to Haiti and playing at Haiti for people who didn't weren't familiar with a lot of the kind of more classical rock elements of arcade fire. So I think that's fantastic song. The afterlife is, at your point, got the song at the end of the record, they got to end the record after that. That's the best song on the record by far.

And I think really summarizes, you know, kind of compliments, you know, the sort of arcade fire earnestness and ties it into into the dance record. I think reflectors phenomenal. And when on the live reflector tour, they had a fantastic gimmick where each city, they did a local that was relevant to the city. And so in DC, they played off of 13 songs, one of the black and the name of the fugazi, the waiting room, which was so cool.

50 that had the pure punk influence. And then I saw them in New York a few weeks later and they brought out Marky Ramone and did a whole number of Ramone songs, I think, which sort of demonstrates, you know, how they wanted to kind of infuse this punk element as well into the dance record. I was reading a bit about reflector and I saw a quote from Wind Butler in about the making of. He said, if you can get James Murphy tapping his foot, you know you're on the right track.

It's pretty good summation of what's happening, I think, on reflector. The title track, the first track, that is a killer song. And of all the arcade fire I've listened to over the past two to three weeks, it's a song that gets stuck in my head most often that I've got to go back and play again. Move to it.

It is a dance, punk kind of track. But the lyrics are solid. If this is heaven, I need something more just a place to be alone. I love the title track.

We exist is excellent. Tim mentioned afterlife right at the end of the album. It's like the most old school, old model arcade fire track, I think, on the album. And it's a great one right near the tail.

Jeff was critical of the suburbs being a little bloated. I would say reflector to me is a little bloated. And I know that Jeff loves the second disc or the second half of the album. I will kick it to him to defend because outside of afterlife and I like super symmetry, which closes the album, the rest of the second half didn't do it for me as much as it does for you.

Ah, so they're gonna cut porn out. They're gonna cut porn out. Yeah. Yeah.

No, they could not have cut porn out. That's one of my favorite songs. Listen, first of all, the funny thing is you talk about reflector, you talk about liking the lyrics. This album is, first of all, reflector is a collaboration with David Bowie.

He sings on the backing track, the backing vocals. You can hear him in the middle eight section. And it's very appropriate because the song itself and the album itself has a lot of really esoteric obsessions that really I would suspect that people who don't drill down to this stuff understand. It's based on this weird Kierkegaardian philosophical premise that there are two different ages.

There's an age of passion and an age of reflection that the romantic era of the 19th century, you know, Beethoven, Wagner, the Lord Byron was an age of passion where people did things and felt things and you know, I mean grand noble gestures, but now that we live in an age of reflection where we're not actors, we're mostly critics. We sit there and we tell you why you shouldn't do this, why you shouldn't do that. We critique, we henpack, we pull at things instead of actually acting. Reflector is based on that premise.

And if that sounds bizarre, well, hey, don't blame me, blame wind butler. That's the entire premise of it. And that's why the cover is a statue of Orpheus in Eurydice, the classic Greek myth of Orpheus, the great bard whose voice could tame the most furious animals. His wife was bitten by a snake and sent to hell and he descended into hell to try to bring her back.

And this is reflected in the only quote two part song that Arcade Fire has ever done that I really think absolutely holds up from the start to finish. And that is awful sound. Oh, Eurydice, it's never over. It's the second part.

Hey, Orpheus. These are songs that if you don't understand this sort of basic mythological background, you may just hear them as nice noise. They're profoundly moving. And it's kind of an interesting suggestion of how they have evolved as artists, as musicians, as wind butler and Rijin Shassan as lyricists.

They have grown from the sort of adolescence, adenoidal, if you will, sincerity to a deeper felt feeling of trying to reach for transcendence but in a way that isn't embarrassing. This is a song that kind of consciously links itself to timeless classical myth and it does it in a way that doesn't feel cliche, doesn't feel overdone. And that in fact, if you weren't explicitly keyed into it the way that I have tried to just do for you now, you would not even necessarily have been aware of. It's never over.

It's one of the songs. You just said, I talk about why do I care so much about the second half of Reflector? It's because it first of all, it has that dance music vibe. It moves.

Everything on that second disc moves. The first half, I think, other than Reflector and We Exist, it gets a little gourmless and I'm not a huge fan of it. But the second disc of Reflector is constantly shifting, mutating, and it's always keeping you on your feet. You start with awful sound, then you move on to it's never over.

Then you have porno, which Tim, you're so wrong that it's a beautiful song. It's slick, it's sleazy, it's disgusting, but the music is like a late night, 2 AM demo recorded out of disgust, and it just conveys all of that vibe. And then you go into After Life, which we I think agree After Life. After Life is the best song on Reflector.

It's one of the five best songs that Arcade Fire ever did. And then finally at the end you have Super Symmetry, which is a very quiet thing that had existed I think for many years before. Brought to bear by the James Murphy production experience in a very subtle way. I actually went around and I researched, I asked questions.

And I found out that a lot of these songs really basically all existed in the form that you hear them on the album, but it was really a question of how to put them on the record. And Murphy didn't really write this music, he didn't actually throw songwriting ideas into it. We also asked, well, why is Reflector such a left turn from the suburbs? Suburbs are sort of traditional indie rock.

And Reflector has this very strong dance music vibe. They were always headening in that direction. My theory about Arcade Fire has always been that they were a secret dance band from the start. They wanted to do that.

They found Murphy at the right time and he helped them bring what they had already been there to bear. And the second disc of Reflector is the finest fruit of that collaboration. I recommend every song on it as being among the best things I ever did. They even wrote a song about how I don't want to live in America no more.

It's called Windows Cell. And yet now they find themselves living in New Orleans. Tim, what do you have to say? I wanted to thank the track for me to them at the start.