Day After Day #321: Rebellion (Lies)

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Rebellion (Lies) (2004)

Twenty years ago, indie rock bands were popping out of the woodwork and a legion of nerds with MP3 blogs was sharing their music to the masses. One band that blew up immediately was the Arcade Fire, a Montreal-based act that made emotional, stirring anthems. They became industry darlings, renowned for their exhilarating live performances, and collaborated with some of the biggest names in rock. If you asked me in 2004 where the Arcade Fire would be 20 years later, I would have said they'd be one of the biggest bands in the world. The band is still touring two decades later, but its profile has diminished considerably for a number of reasons.

Arcade Fire was formed in 2001 in Montreal by Win Butler and Josh Deu, who first met at Phillips Exeter Academy as high school kids. The band came together when Butler was attending McGill University and Deu was at Concordia University in Montreal; they added Regine Chassagne, a music student, and other members. The band started recording an EP in Mount Desert Island, Maine, at Butler's family farm; the lineup changed, with Butler's brother Will and Tim Kingsbury brought in to replace Deu and Brendan Reed. 

Adding drummer Howard Bilerman in 2003, the band played live shows and recorded its first album, Funeral, which was released in September 2004 on Merge Records. The title referred to the deaths of several family members of the band. The album got an immediate boost from a review by online publication Pitchfork, which gave it a 9.7 out of 10; Pitchfork reviews carried a lot of weight back then, and the aforementioned MP3 blog nerdz praised it to high heaven. That's how I heard about the album, which I actually downloaded from one of those sites. Win Butler's impassioned vocals and the band's everything-including-the-kitchen-sink instrumentation gave the album an exciting, arena-ready feel, while also pushing aside the ironic attitude of '90s bands.

"Rebellion (Lies)" was the fifth single off the album, but it connected instantly with audiences and became a show-closer for years. 

"Sleeping is giving in/No matter what the time is/Sleeping is giving in/So lift those heavy eyelids/People say that you'll die/Faster than without water/But we know it's just a lie/Scare your son, scare your daughter/People say that your dreams/Are the only things that save you/Come on baby, in our dreams/We can live our misbehavior/Every time you close your eyes (Lies! Lies)/Every time you close your eyes (Lies! Lies!)/Every time you close your eyes (Lies! Lies!)/Every time you close your eyes (Lies! Lies!)"

The song picks up steam as it goes on, exhorting the listener to rebel against everything that your parents said to scare you.

"People try and hide the night/Underneath the covers/People try and hide their lies/Underneath the covers/Come on hide your lovers/Underneath the covers/Come on hide your lovers/Underneath the covers/Hiding from your brothers/Underneath the covers/Come on hide your lovers/Underneath the covers."

Live versions of the song (see below) were cathartic and thrilling, as the nearly 10 band members gave it their all in every performance. Funeral routinely topped 2004 year-end lists (including mine) with delirious praise heaped upon it. 

Arcade Fire followed it up with 2007's Neon Bible, which was strong and anthemic and continued the band's trajectory, debuting at #2 on the Billboard 200. They appeared on SNL, Win and Chassagne guested at a Springsteen concert and the band played at an Obama campaign event at the president's request. The band's 2010 album The Suburbs did even better, debuting at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart and winning Album of the Year at the 2011 Grammy Awards. The band also contributed to the soundtrack of The Hunger Games, one of the biggest movies of the year.

But the band's next album, 2013's Reflektor, was a bit of a misstep, a double album that delved into dance music. It still got decent reviews, but I didn't dig it. It felt pretentious and frankly, it just wasn't interesting to me. But it still went to #1 on the Billboard 200. The band's 2017 release, Everything Now, got mixed reviews but again debuted at #1. Arcade Fire's most recent album is 2022's We, which hit #6 on the album chart. I couldn't tell you what anything off the last two albums sounds like. That kind of shows you what it means to have a top 10 album these days: not a whole hell of a lot.

Two years ago, frontman Win Butler was accused of sexual misconduct by four people; Butler denied the allegations and said the encounters were all consensual, but there was definitely fallout. Feist dropped off the band's European tour as a result of the allegations, and Beck later did the same for the American leg. Will Butler left the band right after the album was recorded in 2021. 

Despite the controversy, the band has been playing some festivals the last few years. I haven't listened to their music much over the last decade-plus, although I've heard a few songs from their first album at the gym in recent months. Listening to some of Funeral for this piece reminded me of what a great band they were 20 years ago, but I'm still not going to listen to their newer stuff. I've moved on.

Long Slow Goodbye

It's been quite the week. I mean, it's been quite the year, but you knew that already. On Monday, I drove Hannah up to Montreal to begin her first year at McGill University. Actually, she has to first quarantine for two weeks in a hotel before she can move into her dorm. Canada has been pretty strict about limiting visitors, especially those from our COVID-ridden country. Because H and I are both Canadian citizens, we were able to get in, although I had to promise the border agent I would drop Hannah off and leave the country immediately, not getting out of my car at any point before I left the confines of the Great White North. 

Here we are in 2003 and 17 years later, just before we left for Montreal:

 

It's a big life moment, sending your kid off to college. It didn't happen the way we would have liked. Ideally, we would have gone up earlier in the summer (Lily was supposed to take a summer course at McGill) to set Hannah up with a bank account and stuff like that, and then we would have taken her to school in late August and helped her move everything into her dorm. But thanks to COVID-19 and the supremely shitty way the U.S. has handled (or not handled) it, Canada has closed its border to non-essential travel from the U.S. Classes are being done remotely and many international students are being denied entry. The dorms are still open (mostly for first-year students) and we wanted Hannah to have some semblance of a freshman year, so we decided to send her up there anyway. 

We were a little concerned about how the border crossing would go, because we had read that some parents weren't allowed to cross the border with their kids and had to call a car service to take them the rest of the way. I felt like being a Canadian citizen and having no plans to stay up there, I'd be allowed to drop her off, but you never know. I had the number of a car service in my phone just in case. We got to the border around 2:45 on Monday and there were no other cars there. It took only seven minutes to get through. H had filled out a travel plan using a Canadian government app, so the agent had that and looked at our citizenship documents and U.S. passports, but he spent most of the time going over the quarantine requirements and the penalties for violating them. 

From the border, it was another hour to downtown Montreal and Hannah's hotel. I had to circle a few times before I could get a parking spot out front. I got all of her bags loaded onto a luggage cart and then it was time to say goodbye. It was still tough to drive away from the hotel, but I was quickly distracted by having to figure out how to get back to the highway out of the city. Eventually I did, and then I had five hours of solo driving to think about how much I'd miss the kid. 

It's not like we were attached at the hip anymore like in that first photo. She's 18 and very independent, and she very much enjoys spending time alone reading/watching TV/online/listening to music. Reminds me of someone else I know. Although she still would go through phases where she'd just come out and hang out with us to watch a show or just be goofy. If there's one good thing about the last five months, it's that I got to spend a lot more time with her than I probably would have normally.

This is Day 6 of her quarantine. I'm sure she's bored out of her mind, but she's been reading, watching TV and FaceTiming with us and her friends. It's very strange to get up in the morning and not see her snoozing in her room across the hall. Lily took very little time to clear out their shared bedroom of everything Hannah-related (we're turning our guest room into her room for when she's home), but she definitely misses her big sister. We're adjusting to life without Hannah. We probably won't see her again until sometime around Christmas, but at least we're connected via technology. When I went to college, I would call home once a week just to check in, but I would only go home once a month (I was only half an hour away from home, so it was easy) to work and make some money. I was happy to be out of the house, especially considering things were not so great there at the time. Hannah's happy to be out of the country, but at the same time, she misses us and her friends and also is sort of in this weird stasis period where she is literally stuck in a room for 14 days. Normally, she would have made a bunch of new friends and gone to see the city, but that will have to wait until the 24th. 

And so our partially empty nest situation has begun. We've got Lily for two more years and then she's off (and she can't wait). That will be REALLY weird. But this is weird enough for now.

Ye Olde Hit Parade: Wave Goodbye

Editor's note: Ye Olde Hit Parade takes a look back at my favorite songs year by year (starting in 1978, when I really started paying attention to music).

2012: Ty Segall Band - Wave Goodbye

There was a considerable collection of humans who spent 2012 expecting the world to end. I mean, that happens every year, but some interpretations of old Mayan predictions found a belief that some sort of cosmic event would happen to end life as we know it. As we now understand, the end of the world is actually happening right now (I keed, I keed). But in things that actually happened in 2012, President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney to win a second term in office. Facebook bought Instagram and went public. Tablets like the iPad became a big seller. Did I mention the world didn't end?

For me, it was a difficult year at work. It was clear the company was having some serious issues with its direction; namely, that direction was the wrong one and the layoffs continued throughout the year. It all culminated in December, when I was called into a colleague's office to find out my entire division had been eliminated. Fortunately, they still needed someone to do my old job and offered it to me. Having no other options, I took it. Turned out to be a good move.

One cool work-related thing was a trip I took to Austin in March. It was the week after South by Southwest, so there were literally no bands in town, which was a bummer. But even though I was by myself, I had a great time eating BBQ, going to cool bars and see movies at the Alamo Drafthouse. In the summer, we drove up to Montreal for a week for a good family vacation. It was a lot different than previous trips to Montreal, which revolved around drinking, hockey and adult entertainment. But it was fun, and little did we know at the time that my oldest would be going to college there (she joins the class of '24 at McGill University this fall).

Commercial radio had been dying a slow, painful death for a while, but in 2012, it hit a crescendo when WFNX went off the air. The station had always been an independent alternative rock station and it was my station of choice pretty much from the early '90s onward. Boston's big rock station WBCN had gone off the air a few years earlier and hard rock station WAAF finally gave up the ghost this past February. But I had stopped listening to commercial radio years before 2012, especially after I got an iPod and then got into podcasts.


It was another year full of interesting music that I was into. Strong indie rock from the likes of Divine Fits, Titus Andronicus, Japandroids, Cloud Nothings, A.C. Newman and METZ. Returns from old favorites like Van Halen, Soundgarden, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Mission of Burma, Bob Mould and Paul Westerberg. Cool new stuff from Torche, Parquet Courts, Golden Gurls, Metric, El-P and Redd Kross. Concerts included: Wild Flag, Mark Lanegan Band, Matthew Sweet, Iron Maiden, Mean Creek/Mellow Bravo/Soccer Mom, Bob Mould, the Afghan Whigs, Sloan, Guillermo Sexo/Johnny Foreigner/Speedy Ortiz/Infinity Girl and the Tragically Hip.



But my favorite song and album came from the Ty Segall Band. Segall is a prolific fellow, releasing three albums in 2012, but my favorite was the scuzz-rock masterpiece Slaughterhouse. Backed by a powerhouse band including the great Mikal Cronin on bass, Segall unleashed a scorching collection of bangers that mix psychedelia with bone-crushing heaviness. "Wave Goodbye" is the best distillation of this formula, a Sabbathy freakout that is guaranteed to get heads nodding vigorously. Thankfully, the subsequent eight years have done nothing to slow Segall down. He's continued to release great and varied music. Seeing him live is the best, though, as you can see by the clip above. I saw him a few years ago in a tiny club and it was intense and almost overwhelming.


Honorable mentions: Ty Segall - "Death"; Divine Fits - "Would That Not Be Nice"; Divine Fits - "My Love Is Real"; Mark Lanegan Band - "The Gravedigger's Song"; Titus Andronicus - "Ecce Homo"; Titus Andronicus - "In a Big City"; Japandroids - "Fire's Highway"; Torche - "Kicking"; The Tragically Hip - "At Transformation"; Neil Young and Crazy Horse - "Walk Like a Giant"; A.C. Newman - "Encyclopedia of Classic Takedowns"; Mission of Burma - "Semi-Pseudo Sort of Plan"; Van Halen - "China Town"; Dinosaur Jr. - "Watch the Corners"; Cloud Nothings - "No Future/No Past"; METZ - "Wasted"; Bob Mould - "Star Machine"; Bob Mould - "The Descent"; Paul Westerberg - "My Road Now"; Shearwater - "You As You Were"; Craig Finn - "Honolulu Blues"; Redd Kross - "Researching the Blues"; Two Gallants - "My Love Won't Wait"; Ladyhawk - "You Read My Mind"; Band of Skulls - "Sweet Sour"; Aimee Mann - "Charmer"; Metric - "The Wanderlust"; David Byrne & St. Vincent - "Who"; The Afghan Whigs - "Lovecrimes"; Gary Clark, Jr. - "Glitter Ain't Gold (Jumpin' for Nothin')"; Guided By Voices - "The Unsinkable Fats Domino"; Golden Gurls - "I Can See the City"; Ceremony - "Hysteria"; Parquet Courts - "Borrowed Time"; The Henry Clay People - "EveryBandWeEverLoved"; El-P - "Drones Over Bklyn"; Soundgarden - "By Crooked Steps"   

Travel As Equals

One of the great things about living where we do is you can drive a few hours away and literally be in another country. Our trip to Montreal was fun and quick. We did a ton of walking, which was a little rough on my mom. It was good to see my brother and his wife, who flew in from Milwaukee. A few observations from the four day trip:

• It's a tense time in Quebec, which is gearing up for a big election on Sept. 4. The Parti Quebecois, which in the past has called for Quebec to secede from the rest of Canada, is leading in the polls. There was a big debate Sunday night when we arrived in town, and the signs are everywhere, along with the corresponding graffiti on said signs. It's unclear whether PQ will push for another referendum on secession; it's happened in the past in 1980 and 1995 and was shot down, albeit by a very close margin last time. Doesn't make any sense to me, especially in these economic times. We'll see what happens.
• We visited the Montreal BioDome (no signs of Pauly Shore anywhere), which replicated the various ecosystems of North America, complete with vegetation and animals. One of the exhibits featured bats in a cave, which was ironic since we got home and two days later (last night) a bat appeared in our living room. I spent a half  hour trying to knock it down with a broom before I finally was able to smack it and knock it silly; we then relocated it to the outdoors. The last time we were blessed with a bat was four years ago; hopefully it'll at least be that long before another one gets in.
• On Wednesday, we walked a mile from our hotel up to Mount Royal, which is a big hill/national park that you can climb and look out over the entire city. It was pretty cool. We later walked down to Old Montreal for a cruise and then dinner. Deb estimated that we walked about six miles that day. Incidentally, as we were walking back to the hotel after going to Mount Royal, we stumbled upon a demonstration in the park across from the hotel. Apparently, this happens on the 22nd of every month as students protest against various societal ills (tuition hikes, animal abuse, etc.). It actually extended throughout the city, as we discovered in Old Montreal (see photos for some evidence of this).
• The drive back was uneventful...until we were 20 minutes from home and Lily puked in the back row of the minivan. Poor kid. She gets carsick every so often. Oh well. Good to be home.

Ooh La La

Checking in from another vacation--this time around, we're up in Montreal. We drove up this morning with my mother and met my brother and his wife later in the day. Along the way, we stopped at the Ben and Jerry's location in Waterbury, VT, to do the factory tour. I finally got to try Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream and Jimmy Fallon's Late Night Snack. Both of them are pretty good. The girls had fun checking out the Flavor Graveyard, where discontinued Ben and Jerry's flavors are documented on actual headstones.

The border crossing was uneventful and we got into Montreal around 3:30. It's a bit of an adjustment...not the language but the fact that I've got my Droid on airplane mode so I don't get charged roaming fees for data. At least we've got free Internet in the hotel or I'd really be jonesing. I've resolved to use my phone as a camera/watch the next few days.

We're going to do some touristy stuff. I'd been here a few times as a kid but more recently my Montreal visits have been more, ahem, adult in nature. Perfectly happy to do the family thing this week. Our hotel's across from the Bell Centre, where the Montreal Canadiens play, so we might do a tour. We're actually meeting up with friends from Massachusetts tomorrow night and then seeing a friend of my mom's on Tuesday and some relatives Wednesday. And then Thursday, we head back home. I'm actually working on Friday.

And here's a classic slab of rock from Montreal's finest...