Ready to Start
Arcade Fire
"Ready to Start" is Arcade Fire at their most mechanical and most anxious, and the two go together. The song opens with a taut, motorik drum pattern and a snarling low guitar line — closer to post-punk severity than the accordion-and-strings maximalism of Funeral — before the synths arrive to widen it into something cold and glassy. Win Butler sings in a clipped, clenched register about the businessmen drinking his blood and about kids who used to be his friends, staking out a position of refusal that he immediately admits is compromised: if the businessmen want him, he'll come, and he'll wear the suit. That self-implication is what makes it more than a protest. The Suburbs is a concept record about the specific dread of growing up in engineered nowhere, and this track is its ignition — the moment you decide to leave, knowing the leaving is also a sellout. Produced with deliberate flatness, everything slightly compressed and forward, it sounds like driving fast on an arterial road past identical houses. Released the year Arcade Fire became genuinely large, it's a band interrogating its own arrival in real time. Good for the first ten minutes of a commute, or any moment you're steeling yourself to walk into a room.
fast
2010s
mechanical, glassy, cold
Montreal, Canada
post-punk, synth rock. motorik suburban post-punk. anxious, resolute. Clenched refusal admits its own compromise, ending in resigned acceptance of the sellout. energy 7. fast. danceability 5. valence 4. vocals: clipped, clenched, anxious. production: motorik drum pattern, snarling low guitar, widening cold synths, flat forward compression. texture: mechanical, glassy, cold. acousticness 1. era: 2010s. Montreal, Canada. The first ten minutes of a commute, steeling yourself to walk into a room.