“Ready to Start” off Arcade Fire’s incendiary third album The Suburbs was a song that lingered in my head when it was first released in 2010, and when the 80’s New Wave band Tears for Fears recently covered the song I relished in the resurgence, with the added synths and percussion and awesome vocals of frontman Roland Orzabal. If you haven’t heard the version yet, do yourself a service and listen to it right now.
Musician Peter Gabriel, who successively established a solo career in the 80s, also recorded a version of Arcade Fire’s “My Body is a Cage,” on 2010’s Scratch My Back, a compilation of songs covered by Gabriel. And now Arcade Fire’s kinship with the 80’s genre has come full circle on And I’ll Scratch Yours, a follow-up collection of songs by artists like Radiohead, David Byrne and Arcade Fire who cover “Games Without Frontiers.” And I’ll Scratch Yours will be released September 23.
I’m choosing to believe the hype; I don’t care if it’s a sequel. And Arcade Fire is certainly hyping up their upcoming fourth studio album, at this stage of the game you’ve most likely seen a trace of the inferno of promos. The band launched a marketing campaign covering everything from viral events and social media to stickers plastered on streets, handouts at festivals and a mural showcased in Downtown Manhattan with the numbers “9/9/13,” representing the release date of the first single, “Reflektor.”
The album, also titled Reflektor, is quickly becoming one of the most anticipated releases of the year with the debut single creating a lot of buzz with not one, but two music videos; for you web savvy peeps, an interactive version via Google Chrome Experiment, and an altogether different non-interactive, but nothing short of spectacular version, due to director Anton Corbijn, which you can watch here:
The near eight minute song has the bands cutting edge style, and epic sound, oh and a few backing vocals from David Bowie. “Reflektor” balances between lucid and intense and has a great mix of dance beats with an indie feel. Even with all the teasers we still know very little about the album so far, frontman Win Butler only recently revealed that the record was inspired by trips to Haiti and Jamaica, featuring a “voodoo-like” feel.
Arcade Fire is a band that understands the business side of the music industry in that you have to reach your fans in interactive ways. They’ve embraced marketing as a creative process and it’s worked to their advantage. Arcade Fire will be the musical guest on the 39th season premiere of Saturday Night Live on September 28, 2013, but wait there’s more, immediately following the episode NBC will air a 30-minute Arcade Fire concert special. Reflektor, the album, is out October 29.