ARCADE FIRE
London, Apr 30 (EFE).- Arcade Fire’s baroque rock runs through the veins of European stages once again. “We”, the band’s sixth album, is already a reality that Win Butler and his crew are releasing in drops and whose last pill has landed in London.
“It’s been two very screwed up years,” Butler acknowledged on stage at the Koko room, one of the most legendary in London, in the heart of the Camden neighborhood.
That was the place chosen by the Canadian band to play again in Europe after almost four years away from the Old Continent. Almost four years after the “Everything Now” tour brought them to Europe.
Now it is “We”, whose release date is next May 6, which begins to spread through the band’s repertoire and begins to mix with classics such as “Tunnels”, “Afterlife and Reflektor”, which begins to to have a real voice within the imaginary of Arcade Fire, who conscientiously prepared their first landing in London since April 2018.
Then Wembley was the place chosen for a crowd bath, but that was not what the Montrealers were looking for this time, who set aside the magnitude of the temple of English football for a much more flirtatious Koko and with greater symbolism, since this supposed its opening after three years closed.
A reform process and a fire came close to ending a room that saw within its walls The Rolling Stones, Madonna, Elton John, Iron Maiden and The Clash, in addition to being where Bon Scott, from AC / DC, played for last time before his death from alcohol poisoning in 1980.
An iconic place for Arcade Fire to put the machinery to work. Not one song took Butler to melt into the audience. But literal. The singer went down to the stalls of the room to start singing “Age of Anxiety I”, one of the songs included in “We” and that has already been seen in the concerts they have given at the beginning of the year in the United States .
Between the laser beams of Régine and the accelerated pace of Butler, some of the best songs of the band were filtered, such as the cannon of “Ready to Start”, the sound intimacy of “My Body is a Cage” and a “The Suburbs ” that gains even more relevance at a time like the present.
“Do you understand now/Why I want to have a daughter when I’m young?/So I can hold her hand/And show her all this beauty/Before we kill them off,” Butler sang from the piano.
Koko sounded “Sprawl II”, enlivened by Regina’s possessed dances, “Wake Up”, endless in the choirs, and “Rebellion (Lies)”, with the strength of screaming with the chorus. All to culminate with Butler embracing his acoustics and showing his latest creation to the public for the first time. An “End of the Empire” that touches the most sensitive side of the band and that was performed live for the first time.
With its pin, Arcade Fire confirms its return to the European road and opens a Koko room that, after the Canadian earthquake, is already prepared for whatever they throw at it.
Manuel Sanchez Gomez
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