Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Régine Chassagne performs in front of a sold-out crowd at Toronto’s Massey Hall on May 1.Jag Gundu/Supplied
Because Arcade Fire played its yet-to-be-released new album from start to finish to open its concert at Massey Hall on Thursday, a sold-out crowd unfamiliar with the music, but receptive to it, stayed in their seats, at least in the balcony.
The easily indignant frontman Win Butler noticed.
“Are you comfortable in your chairs?” he asked, gazing upward. I was comfortable where I was sitting. Was Butler?
The new album is Pink Elephant, out May 9. It is the first new music from the Montreal-based rockers since 2022, when Butler was accused in a bombshell investigative piece by Pitchfork magazine of inappropriate sexual interactions by three women. The story also alleged that Butler, who is married to bandmate Régine Chassagne, sexually assaulted a gender-fluid fourth person.
Butler acknowledged the sexual interactions, but said they were consensual. He apologized “to anyone who I have hurt with my behaviour.” He has moved on, it seems, and so have the 2,752 Arcade Fire followers who showed up at Massey.
Others have abandoned the band. Some want Butler to address the allegations through a medium other than a crisis public relations expert. As for the music industry, it is nothing but generous in its capacity to disconnect art from the artist. Arcade Fire appears on Saturday Night Live on May 10.
The band itself has put its head down, kept mum and gone to work. Which is why Pink Elephant wasn’t the only elephant in the room at Massey.
The show began with most of the band prostrate on the stage floor, rising seemingly from the dead to take their instruments. If this concert represented a comeback, consider the resurrection exceptional.
The auditorium was hazy with a fog of smoke; the stage was aglow and dimly lit. It all lent an immersive quality that could not be achieved in the size of arenas the band typically plays. The concert (and the two at Montreal’s tiny Olympia Theatre earlier this week) were “underplays,” meaning purposely small.
During much of the performance, Butler stood on a small portable platform at the front of the stage.Jag Gundu/Supplied
The sleek, retro material of Pink Elephant, produced by Daniel Lanois of U2 and Peter Gabriel fame, shimmered and pounded away in equal measures. As children of the 1980s with open ears and a fondness for experimentation, it was natural for Arcade Fire to turn toward new wave at some point.
Chassagne is featured on the album’s lead single, Year of the Snake. Some might find her defiance of proper pitch to be plucky.
Butler’s brother, Will Butler, left the band on good terms at the end of 2021. Multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry is on paternity leave. In addition to band members Tim Kingsbury and Jeremy Gara, the touring lineup includes violinist Sarah Neufeld, multi-talented Paul Beaubrun and Wolf Parade guitarist Dan Boeckner.
Eyes were drawn to Butler, an imposingly tall man once described by SNL‘s Tina Fey as a “Serbian basketball player.” In fact, he is not Serbian. But he prides himself on being a basketball player, and he certainly prides himself on being Win Butler.
Often he stood on a small portable platform at the front of the stage. If a 6′4′’ man carries around his own podium to be better seen, you know he loves an audience. He waded into the crowd more than once.
As a performer, he is a towering mix of poise, vanity, vibration, premeditation, conspicuous headband wearing and enough of a voice to convey his heavy passion.
“Clean up your heart,” he shouted at the end of the first set, on the dynamic, triumphant Stuck in My Head, “you’re missing the best part.”
Texas native Butler and Montreal’s Chassagne live in New Orleans now. He addressed his Canadianess midway through the second set.
“Thank you for accepting a weirdo Houston boy as a fellow Canadian,” said Butler, who was naturalized as a Canadian citizen in 2019.
His U.S. upbringing is the theme to the 2010 conceptual masterpiece The Suburbs. Some of the album was presented in the second half of the concert. On the title track he sang, “So can you understand, that I want a daughter while I’m still young/ I want to hold her hand, and show her some beauty before this damage is done.”
The lovers in front of me clung to each other closer at that line. Where Butler yelled at the crowd in the balcony and upper gallery to stand up during the first set, the crowd needed no instruction during a second set that featured Wake Up and the band’s other hits, if we can call them that.
We probably should not. Rock bands today don’t have hits like they used to, which means it is easier to ignore them than ever, even the best of them. Arcade Fire is absolutely one of those.
