Critiques

Sat 17 Mar – The Arcade Fire, Electrelane

So I did eventually get to see Arcade Fire, albeit two nights later than originally planned. There’s a long story behind that which I won’t bore you with, but it had a positive in that we got to stand down the front and jump around a bit, rather than sitting politely upstairs. It also had a negative in that we got Electralane in support rather than Patrick Wolf and they were a bit rubbish. They started brightly enough, with a rocking piano led opening number, but the lead singer’s voice was whiney and annoying so the only real bright spots were when she stopped singing and they went into a couple of heavy breakdowns. It also led me to make up an on-the-spot theory: that whilst male singers can get away with not being very tuneful if they have an interesting character to their voice, female singers need to be a lot better. This may be complete rubbish but we couldn’t think of a successful front-woman off the top of our heads who didn’t have a pretty damn good singing voice. …