Anticipation is building for the brand new album from Arcade Fire, produced by LCD Soundsystem boffin James Murphy and due this October – pegging the band on the Big Day Out rumour mill – but the Canadian collective have offered fans a taste of brand new material in a studio recorded cover as part of a star-studded tribute album to Peter Gabriel.
Arcade Fire, along with the likes of Bon Iver, Lou Reed, Elbow, Talking Head David Byrne, producer extraordinaire Brian Eno, and more all feature on a brand new collection of covers dedicated to Peter Gabriel, as Pitchfork reports.
The compilation is cleverly called And I’ll Scratch Yours and is the follow-up to Peter Gabriel’s 2010 album Scratch My Back, which featured the former Genesis frontman-turned-solo star covering songs by Bon Iver, Lou Reed, Elbow, Talking Heads and Arcade Fire’s ‘My Body Is A Cage’.
The lineup for the covers album tit-for-tat isn’t all vice-versa, with Gabriel’s renditions of Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out) and Neil Young’s ‘Philadelphia’ replaced by contributions from Feist and singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur. But the rest of the tracklist features the bands that Gabriel paid tribute to paying the favour in kind with their own versions of selections from his catalogue.
The compilation is out 23rd September through Real World, Gabriel’s own record label, who have offered an audio teaser of the album in the form of Arcade Fire’s 40-sec teaser of ‘Games Without Frontiers’, taken from Peter Gabriel’s 1980 self-titled album.
Other covers on And I’ll Scratch Yours include Bon Iver’s ‘Come Talk To Me’ (originally recorded for Record Store Day), Lou Reed tackling ‘Solsbury Hill’, Elbow’s rendition of ‘Mercy Street’, fellow music veteran Paul Simon doing famous emancipation anthem ‘Biko’, and Feist covering Peter Gabriel’s Kate Bush-featuring Duet ‘Don’t Give Up’ with Timber Timbre.
Arcade Fire’s contribution will mark their first new material since releasing their 2010 album The Suburbs, and precede their as-yet untitled fourth album, due for release in October and still shrouded in secrecy.
Former LCD Soundsytem frontman and producer James Murphy has been the only one discussing the album, telling Billboard that working with Arcade Fire was “way better than I expected it to be. Producing is always really hard, and you can never tell who’s going to be easy to get along with and who’s going to be difficult. So I wasn’t sure what was going to be the case, since there’s a lot of them. I figured, they’re all super talented, do they need another dude there with his opinions?,” he questioned.
“It turned out it was really nice, and everyone was amazingly respectful of one another,” he adds.
As for the sound of the record, Murphy told NME recently that “It sounds like Arcade Fire in the way that only Arcade Fire sound like Arcade Fire, you know? It’s really fucking epic. Seriously. I mean, I feel at this point like I’m too close to it to really talk it up and do it justice.”
And I’ll Scratch Yours is out 23rd September via Real World. View the artwork and tracklisting below.
And I’ll Scratch Yours Tracklisting:
01 David Byrne: “I Don’t Remember”
02 Bon Iver: “Come Talk to Me”
03 Regina Spektor: “Blood of Eden”
04 Stephin Merritt: “Not One of Us”
05 Joseph Arthur: “Shock the Monkey”
06 Randy Newman: “Big Time”
07 Arcade Fire: “Games Without Frontiers”
08 Elbow: “Mercy Street”
09 Brian Eno: “Mother of Violence”
10 Feist: “Don’t Give Up” [ft. Timber Timbre]
11 Lou Reed: “Solsbury Hill”
12 Paul Simon: “Biko”
