Irresolute singing
P&J trek:
Listened to this year's Arcade Fire album for the first time, thought the tunes were almost always good, the playing and arrangements were usually good but with a self-defeating tendency towards recessiveness and obscurity, and the singing ranged from passably effective to borderline unbearable. And I paid no attention to the words.
So the singing. It actually doesn't range much at all, but its effect varies with the accompaniment, the poor happy smile of a gargle (that's how I described the singing to Alex O., and I didn't mean that it conveys or is meant to convey happiness, more like it's a frozen desperate smile that's used for all sorts of emotions, and I see no reason in principle that the style can't work) functioning somewhat effectively when the instruments are loud and/or fast, while being hopeless when the material is quiet and sensitive. Think the ending of "Rococo" is the one part where the singing doesn't need improvement: the voice, by being both strained and ethereal, places imperiled beauty within the rising instrumental menace that surrounds it (so this is where the tendency towards obscurity helps rather than hurts). The ragged vocals in "Empty Room" and "Month Of May" (which don't seem to be Win Butler's, though maybe he's just changing up) work really well at the start, and what goes wrong on those two promising tracks isn't the singing but the overall form, the group not willing to play pop-punk straight. Album's best moment is the start to "Modern Man," where the guitars strum with the same clipped tension as on Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl," the irresolute singing not a plus but not sabotaging the song either - the sabotage starts about a minute in, where the sound gets all diffuse and I wish I had "Jessie's Girl" instead.
Listened to this year's Arcade Fire album for the first time, thought the tunes were almost always good, the playing and arrangements were usually good but with a self-defeating tendency towards recessiveness and obscurity, and the singing ranged from passably effective to borderline unbearable. And I paid no attention to the words.
So the singing. It actually doesn't range much at all, but its effect varies with the accompaniment, the poor happy smile of a gargle (that's how I described the singing to Alex O., and I didn't mean that it conveys or is meant to convey happiness, more like it's a frozen desperate smile that's used for all sorts of emotions, and I see no reason in principle that the style can't work) functioning somewhat effectively when the instruments are loud and/or fast, while being hopeless when the material is quiet and sensitive. Think the ending of "Rococo" is the one part where the singing doesn't need improvement: the voice, by being both strained and ethereal, places imperiled beauty within the rising instrumental menace that surrounds it (so this is where the tendency towards obscurity helps rather than hurts). The ragged vocals in "Empty Room" and "Month Of May" (which don't seem to be Win Butler's, though maybe he's just changing up) work really well at the start, and what goes wrong on those two promising tracks isn't the singing but the overall form, the group not willing to play pop-punk straight. Album's best moment is the start to "Modern Man," where the guitars strum with the same clipped tension as on Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl," the irresolute singing not a plus but not sabotaging the song either - the sabotage starts about a minute in, where the sound gets all diffuse and I wish I had "Jessie's Girl" instead.