Arcade Fire closes out Life is Beautiful in downtown Las Vegas
Four songs in, they explained why they were here.
It went like this: Arcade Fire’s tour for its previous album, 2013’s “Reflektor,” ended in scenic Iceland.
Considering that the band’s latest record, “Everything Now,” is all about capitalism’s collapse and the American dream turning into a nightmare for some, what better place to conclude its roadwork than … Las Vegas!
Arcade Fire singer-guitarist Win Butler was joking — kind of — when he shared the band’s thinking from Life is Beautiful’s Downtown Stage.
Back in 2005, Arcade Fire also completed a tour cycle here at a multiday music festival: the long-gone Vegoose, where the group finished supporting its debut, “Funeral.”
Arcade Fire has since become an arena-headlining act, and its set on the final day of Life is Beautiful reemphasized how the band got there: its widespread sound is tailored for large spaces, suffused with accordion, horns and oceans of percussion, its six-piece lineup expanding to nine live.
“Everything” is the band’s darkest, most disconsolate record, even if the sonics don’t always seem to suit the subject: The title track sounds like an invitation to a dance party, though it’s about the desensitizing effects of constant stimulation in the digital age.
This was the band’s second stop in Vegas in support of the album. The first was mere weeks after the Oct. 1 Route 91 Harvest festival massacre, when Arcade Fire delivered a heartfelt, inspired show at the Mandalay Bay Events Center.
Butler acknowledged the tragedy Sunday, dedicating “The Suburbs” to anyone affected by it.
And then he and Arcade Fire did what this city has been doing ever since: They carried on.
A few more highlights from the third and final day of Life is Beautiful:
Earworm of the day
A crowd member joked that the teenagers on stage looked more like students from nearby Las Vegas Academy holding a band recital for nervous parents than a buzz-worthy group playing in front of thousands at a music festival.
Spot-on there.
But a youthful precociousness is central to the London-based indie pop octet Superorganism’s appeal: There’s not a whiff of adulthood’s fun-spoiling pragmatism in the group’s anything-goes attitude toward its craft.
Take “Everybody Wants To Be Famous,” which the band performed near the end of its griddle-hot afternoon set at the Bacardi Sound of Rum Stage.
Over a woozy, seasick beat and whirring, wheezing electronics, frontwoman Orono Noguchi favored a Steven Wright-worthy deadpan while giving voice to melodies as animated as her delivery was sedated.
It’s quite the contrast, but seemingly half the crowd left the stage humming the tune.
“See you over at Mars,” Noguchi sang, flanked by brightly attired backing singers with streamer-adorned tambourines, sounding as if that destination had already been reached — at least on her end.
From Sweden with love of lap steel
Is there such a thing as Swedish Americana?
However that question may read on paper, a pair of 20-something, Stockholm-born sisters rendered it moot on stage.
Johanna and Klara Soderberg, aka First Aid Kit, may have name-checked Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris in song during their spirited performance, but they didn’t need to: Their influences hardly have to be spelled out, as their rootsy swing is directly indebted to ’70s country, back when the music was more dust-covered than spit-shined.
But what most distinguishes these two from plenty of like-minded peers is their radiant harmonies, bright as the sun setting behind them Sunday on the Downtown Stage. Paired with lap steel guitar and mandolin, their intertwined voices buoyed songs such as “Stay Gold” and “It’s a Shame” with a melodic sheen that nicely balances their songs’ overall earthiness.
Give ’em extra credit for a nod to their surroundings: During their first Vegas performance, they played a cover of Kenny Rogers’ version of “The Gambler,” coming up aces.
Gold sounds
“I got the talk, the beats and bass,” said the lady in the red cape adorned with dollar bills and empty plastic water bottles while flanked by a pair of dancers in ’80s-style tennis gear.
The song was “Unstoppable,” and Santigold was feeling herself.
The crowd was feeling it, too, literally — that aforementioned bass rumbled like a tectonic shift at the Bacardi Sound of Rum Stage.
Like her homemade stage garb, Santigold’s sound is a mix of things: dancehall, new wave, electro, indie pop, sometimes all of them blaring in unison.
Perhaps her greatest skill, though, is establishing some sense of order among all the mayhem, her voice an alternately supple and commanding trail of bread crumbs to hook after hook.
How does Santigold do it?
“I believe in the rhythm,” she sang, putting her faith in the groove.
Creator of chaos
And now a message from the department of redundancy department.
“We ain’t cut from the same fabric,” Tyler, the Creator said of his hip-hop brethren in song.
“I don’t like to follow the rules,” he added a few bars later.
This from the human incarnation of a spitball shot at the English teacher.
No, we don’t really need to be told at this point that perhaps rap’s greatest contemporary mischief-maker doesn’t like to toe the line.
He’s made a career of being a playful, willing antagonist of hip-hop mores.
For instance, on the song in question, “Deathcamp,” delivered with limb-flinging fury at the Bacardi Sound of Rum Stage, he professed to be more influenced by rap-rockers N.E.R.D.’s “In Search Of …” than Nas’ “Illmatic,” roundly considered one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time.
Makes sense, though, “In Search Of …” pulses with an anything-goes punk attitude and Tyler, the Creator certainly embodies that.
Maybe this explains why he went over especially well with Life is Beautiful’s younger, teenage attendees, who greeted him with near-hysterics Sunday, siphoning off a massive portion of the crowd from Arcade Fire, whose set overlapped with his and whom he seemed to outdraw, even though the former performed on the bigger stage.
With his droopy eyes and sly grin, Tyler looks the part of class cut-up, but all of his rule-breaking serves a larger purpose.
“Tell these black kids they can be who they are,” he commanded on “Where This Flower Blooms.” “Dye your hair blue,” he instructed. “I’ll do it, too.”
Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.