Last week, Arcade Fire dropped the title track and first taste of their new album Reflektor – easily one of the year’s most anticipated releases – which is due out on 29th October before Canadian art rock outfit headline next year’s Big Day Out.
An 8 minute disco-leaning jam that featured David Bowie and a strong hint of LCD Soundsystem via producer James Murphy, ‘Reflektor’ (the song) capped what had a been an ongoing viral campaign in which strange graffiti and symbols began springing up in major cities all over the globe.
The Reflektor graffiti campaign has also been compounded by the band releasing mysterious 12” vinyl singles in selected record stores around the world, as well as playing secret shows under the non de plume ‘The Reflektors’ at clubs in their native Montreal.
Combined, the guerrilla campaign has done its part job beautifully in drumming up hype for Arcade Fire’s first album since the Grammy-winning 2010 album, The Suburbs, with the band hiring a number of street artists around the world to get the word out on Reflektor with their graffiti and stencils.
But the owner of a framing business in Texas isn’t so amped about the new Arcade Fire album or its marketing campaign, after his shop was spray-painted with the Reflektor logo.
Following his wife discovering the graffiti on the wall of their Austin custom picture framing store, Ian Dille wrote a piece for Slate magazine titled ‘My Wife Was Vandalized By Arcade Fire‘ in which he complains that he feels “used” by a marketing campaign that is less art and more “commercial promotion.”
“My wife and I are fans of Arcade Fire,” admits Dille, but “when I found out the logo was nothing but a commercial promotion I felt … used. Even—and maybe this is too harsh?—a little betrayed.”
(Image: Ian Dille. Source: Slate)
Dille and his wife “spent hours” removing the “socially irresponsible” mural and some posters that covered a stencil (“I’d call the stork graffiti, but it’s beloved by my wife and me, and the shop’s owner. Thus: art,” argues Dille), but besides complaining of the manual labour, Dille concludes his piece by writing: “If you’re an internationally renowned band that’s defacing public and private property for promotional purposes, maybe go back to the drawing board, and think some more about how you want to let people know about your music.”
The upset was enough to compel Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler into penning a response to Dille’s complaints. “I’m really sorry that you and your wife had to put up with that,” writes Butler in a handwritten letter apologising to the disgruntled store owner.
“It is sometimes hard to control all those tiny details when you’re doing something on such a large scale,” he adds by way of explanation, noting that Reflektor-taggers were meant to use environmentally friendly water soluble materials (those pesky street artists).
(Image: Ian Dille. Source: Slate)
With Dille having posted the written apology to his Slate piece, it would see all is forgiven, which gives Butler time to get back to hyping the hell out of Reflektor ahead of its release next month.
The Arcade Fire frontman has described the double album as “a mash up of Studio 54 and Haitian voodoo,” in a recent interview with BBC Radio 1’s Zane Lowe, saying that the title track reflects the album’s stronger emphasis on rhythms, inspired by their trip to Haiti two years ago, even enlisting the help of local conga players for the album and subsequent touring, as Consequence of Sound points out.
The guest players helped in developing the “underlying voodoo rhythms,” says Butler, as well as the skills of Arcade Fire’s own skins-thumper, Jeremy Gara; “Jeremy has never drummed better… really magical,” describes Buter. “The grooves are really deep. These conga beats are the language in Haiti. They’re how people communicate.”
Attendees at the 2014 Big Day Out will be among the first in the world to hear and see Arcade Fire’s new material and live show following the release of Reflektor in October, which thankfully won’t clash with the other two big headliners, Pearl Jam and Blur, which means you can enjoy what seems to be their disco-fied new tunes without fear of missing out on your dose of grunge and Britpop.
