Angry At God For (Not) Existing

with Modest Mouse and The Arcade Fire

Two bands I can’t get enough of, The Arcade Fire and Modest Mouse, both recently released fantastic albums. Musically, neither band can be quite pinned down into our nice categorical genres, but both reach soulful pinnacles that drag my innards upwards - the melody paths, the tempo drops, the hums and screams... And lyrically, often through sketchily painted themes, both bands insist on baring sleeved hearts, consistently refusing to shelter their rage, fears, and doubts.

I am quite probably wrong, but when I listen to these bands I feel like The Arcade Fire (at least Win Butler) has journeyed within religion and with God to the point of frustration and doubt, while Modest Mouse (at least Isaak Brock) has searched hard but never found anything up there (though he remains “certainly uncertain”). It’s a brilliant similarity, for what is the difference between a believer’s doubt and an atheist’s disbelief? (There are differences I know, but I’m learning there’s more in common than I would have previously credited.)

“It honestly was beautifully bold, like trying to save an ice cube from the cold”

The spectrum of sounds on Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank is a delight. The opener, March Into The Sea swells into the listener’s ears setting the scene, the pop driven Dashboard follows, stackfulls of syncopated guitars, and of course there’s plenty of manic screams and vocal weirdness from the front man throughout. They’re also a band who know how to pull at our heart strings with the likes of the contemplative People As Places As People and Missed The Boat (featuring the honeysweet vocals of Shins’ singer, James Mercer).Lyrically, with endless gems that raise a smile, Brock hovers around thoughts of mortality and mundane existence: “Someday you will die and somehow some thing or someone steals your carbon”, “Let’s shake hands if you want but soon both hands are gone, ah-ha-ha!”. Science gets sarcastically mocked as it is incapable of answering all the singer’s questions (“We’ve got everything down to a science, so I guess we know everything!”), while a certain sympathy is offered towards religion - though he confesses, and asserts the challenge on to us, that “we listen more to life’s end gong than the sound of life’s sweet bells”.But life isn’t hollow despite its brevity. Brock lets us know where he sees the value in his short cycle of life before he “dehydrates back into minerals”- it is in the people around him who he has “loved but didn’t quite know”; he talks of people as “places he wants to go”, and describes a beautiful moment he shared with someone when “the remainders of a shooting star landed directly on our broke-down little car. Before then we had made a wish that we would be missed if one or another just did not exist”

“All the reasons I gave were just lies to buy myself some time”

And then The Arcade Fire. The rough cuts, the pulsing four-on-the-floor kicks, the handclaps, the “Heys!”… Their music is just bursting with joy from inside its brokenness. Neon Bible has had its doubters - some unimpressed uber-cool indie kids - but whatever, this is an epic and glorious record. Sure, perhaps nothing will impact us quite like their first album, Funeral, having come out of nowhere and telling the story of our lives so accurately, but Neon Bible is still incredibly striking.Butler paints a bleak picture through Neon Bible with talk of houses on fire, falling bombs, World War III, planes crashing “two by two”, and how “the tide is high and it’s rising still”. He describes how we’re “living in an age that calls darkness light”, where nothing is straightforward (“a vial of hope and a vial of pain, in the light they both looked the same”) and where “the lions and the lambs ain’t sleeping yet”. Religious imagery like this is dotted throughout, as is his frustration with his Divine. In a number of songs he aims anger up and mocks heaven (“Oh God! Well look at you now! Oh you lost it, but you don’t know how! In the light of a golden calf, oh God! I had to laugh!”); though we shouldn’t be surprised after the tragic irony of “working for the church while your family dies”.Yet, for Butler, there is always something more, some meaning to life, some hope beneath this desolate perspective. The lyrics suggest his sensitivity to divine touches (“In an ocean of noise I first heard your voice, ringing like a bell”), and he speaks of being “resurrected” to “live in a lighthouse” having spent time in a gloomy well, which acted as his prison where “only the moon was shining back”. Most often, though, this feeling of hope is carried through the music, sweeping past the listener in landscapes of strings and rusty guitars and through the pipes of church organs. The Arcade Fire have a sound quite unlike anyone else I have come across. The structures are unique and fun, the voices balance boldness and fragility, the sound is dramatic… I can’t quite put my finger on it, but somehow, out through the rough edges comes a captivating magic.These bands have brought out the fan in me, that part of my insides that has remained hidden for many a year. Both records are excellent- I can’t stop listening to them and fear I will wear them out. All homes should have a copy!

Neon Bible and We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank.