Arts And Crafts - Black Neon

Advantages: Highly emotive, powerful music-making, strong instrumentation
Disadvantages: Poor lyrically, not enough gothic church organ for my taste

..., violinist Sarah Neufeld and drummer Jeremy Gara. The band members routinely swap around their roles on a whim, making it difficult to accurately say who plays what when and why, but roughly that’s what they all play. In 2005, their first album “Funeral” was released, and gained a very quiet following, which ramped up as reviews started to flood in. Pitchfork gave them 9.7 out of 10, Blender and The Guardian gave it a full five stars, and even Stylus awarded an ‘A’ rating. But mainstream success eluded the band, mainly because they tried to avoid it. They refused many television performances, keen to stay an underground scene for as long as possible. The decision meant that their brand of operatic art-rock gained a strong cult following. The tension that blew up as they prepared to release the follow-up to Funeral, called “Neon Bible”, became... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Original
Disadvantages: Not for everyone

...I only bought Arcade Fire's new album because I'm going to see them at Leeds Festival in August so I wasn't exactly expecting a lot but when I listened I was pleasantly surprised. By no means is this the type of music you could recommend for everybody but it is a very original and well put together album. The band consists of over 7 members I think and there is a collection of instruments such as violins and and organ which is put to good use. This album is definitely a very unique style of music which is nice to see getting popular in today's usually quite boring mainstream music scene. The track listing is as follows: 1. Black Mirror 2. Keep The Car Running 3. Neon Bible 4. Intervention 5. Black Wave/ Bad Vibrations 6. Ocean of Noise 7. The Well and the Lighthouse 8. (Anti-Christ Television Blues 9. Windowsill 10. No Cars... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: Just an incredible album
Disadvantages: take a few listens

...I really really like this album, but i do feel it's album you need time for, you need to listen to it more than once to appreciate it fully. Again, it seems to be one of those albums which doesn't live up to the first (Funeral), on first listening, on second listening it comes out of it's shell and amazes. It's a quite a dark album and tends to verge on depressing at points. The songs: My body is a cage- easily my favourite song on the album. It's different from many other songs out at the moment and the lyrics "my body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one i love but my mind hold the key" are lyrics most can relate to. Black Mirror- a whirl of guitar and violin, which shows its true colours after a couple of listens and has a delicacy which is rare today. Neon Bible and Intervention- 2 political songs the latter... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful