The fact that Arcade Fire, Kings Of Leon, and The Killers book the United Center when they play Chicago always baffles me.
I've only ever bought Neon Bible, and I once saw KOL by accident because they opened for U2.
Who buys these tickets?, because NO ONE is buying their albums (or really any albums by rock bands).


There's just so much mediocre to flat out terrible music across all genres for me to give much of a shit anymore.

Listening to them makes me wonder why I'm not listening to a Led Zeplin album instead.

Any band with Wolf in their name may be added to this list. Wolf Parade was patient zero for this trend.

The fact that Arcade Fire, Kings Of Leon, and The Killers book the United Center when they play Chicago always baffles me.
I've only ever bought Neon Bible, and I once saw KOL by accident because they opened for U2.
Who buys these tickets?, because NO ONE is buying their albums (or really any albums by rock bands).

There's just so much mediocre to flat out terrible music across all genres for me to give much of a shit anymore.

House of Jealous Lovers is still an awesome song. I mean in retrospect we can maybe credit the DFA for that, but it still rocks, or whatever sound Indie Rock Bands make.

Change has been boiling under ever since the decade clicked to double zeros. We've wanted more of something, and slowly we've realized what. What you're increasingly witnessing at every club, at every show, with every passing night, is the death of the horrible, awkward, uncomfortable tension of devoted music fans pretending not to enjoy music they have paid to see. Finally, we are shaking off the coma of the stillborn slacker 90s and now there is movement. Arms uncross, faces snap to attention, and clarity hits like religion. We have buried irony and pissed on its grave and for the first time we are realizing what rock music, rock shows are all about.

Fuck, was that a dream? Pavement playing the Showbox in Seattle to throngs of unwashed hippie revivalists acting as if they'd been imprisoned there by a cruel master of ceremonies, their peer and equal Stephen Malkmus? Eddie Vedder iconically scrawling PRO-CHOICE up his left arm like he bore the weight of the entire fucking world and was the only living person with this Great Important Answer to all the world's problems? That the Dismemberment Plan-- among the first to envision this future at which we've now arrived-- called us out to our faces with "Doing the Standing Still" and we actually still just stood there? It's almost impossible to believe in light of music like this, music that finally places as much emphasis on real, true, palpable fun as it does on art.

There is another great album trapped somewhere in Win Butler and Regine Chassagne. I have my doubts we will ever hear it, but I know they can do it.