Don’t be fooled: attending Coachella from the corner of your bedroom is just as exhausting. No, really. Well, Arcade Fire were explosive, weren’t they, so I took a moment to hold my tickets high up to the moonlight and stare at them for a few minutes. Although I wouldn’t mind trading my Radio City ticket for a Sunday night Beirut ticket if anyone’s interested.
Richard Reed Parry is an absolute champion, and Will Butler was up to some maniacal glockenspieling during “Power House Out,” which I would upload but just posting these has been enough work for the weekend available in a crappy You Tube version for now. (I’ll upgrade the quality of these “Keep the Car Running” soon. Also, Power Out - sorry, virtual post-Coachella exhaustion).
“Rebellion (Lies)”
Rebellion (Lies) “Keep the Car Running,” “Antichrist Television Blues” and “Power Out” after the jump:
Just last night I was thinking whatever happened to Regina. Well, two things happened: she got herself a band and her fan base got really annoying. When she was playing “Apres Moi” at Town Hall and she got to the part of the Russian poem, I heard a woman say, “What language is that?” Inexcusable. Another time, and this is unrelated, at a different venue someone said, “I love your boobs,” and she said, “Well you don’t know them.”
Her band’s instrumentation sounds just a little boring, especially when compared to her solo arrangements. There was a Warsaw show in Williamsburg, towards the beginning of the Begin To Hope tour (it might’ve been the first show of that tour), when she played some songs off that album without a band. Bandless versions sounded much more interesting. It’s also irritating to get newsletters asking me to vote for her on TRL. Despite it all though, she is terrific. It seems she’s stopped playing the Baby Jesus song as often, however, and that is a little sad.
Here’s “Apres Moi,” captured from the live webcast. Arcade Fire next:
I’m doing my Coachella coverage from the corner of my bedroom, using my superior technical skills to capture from the live feed. I think I’ll post some mp3s too. So here comes Andrew Bird, with a surprise: he played neither “Simple X” nor “Scythian Empire,” but closed instead w/ “Fake Palindromes.”