Pitchfork

Yesterday, May 1, the Arcade Fire and Superchunk played a free rally for presidential hopeful Barack Obama outside of North Carolina's Greensboro Coliseum. (The North Carolina Democratic Primary is on Tuesday, May 6.) In attendance: art-damaged undergrads and the eager young Obama volunteers pressuring them to vote early.

Superchunk

Superchunk's set was tight and punchy, drawing heavily from their classic album On the Mouth. "Nothing makes you want to vote in 2008 like music from 1993," Mac McCaughan joked, balancing out early Chunk favorites like "Driveway to Driveway" and "Skip Steps 1 & 3" with a cover of the Magnetic Fields' "100000 Fireflies". The audience was respectfully enthusiastic, but when Superchunk broke out "Precision Auto" and nobody went especially apeshit, I wondered if most of them were too young to care much about Superchunk. Watching Laura Ballance pogo to "Package Thief", I didn't feel that far from '93 at all.

Arcade Fire

It seems odd for a band as gloomy as the Arcade Fire to stump for the candidate of hope and change, and it led to some ironic moments. In messianic mode, Win Butler came down into the audience for "Rebellion (Lies)", daring people to dream with a song about the deceit of dreams. But overall, they did a good job of repurposing their music to suit the day. A cover of Bowie's "Heroes" was an uplifting choice. Butler prefaced "Intervention" by saying, "This is a song we wrote before the '04 election, when we realized it wasn't going to happen this time…hopefully, we can write something more upbeat in '08."

Bleak sentiments aside, the Arcade Fire is an almost diabolically inspiring live band; their emphatic renditions of "No Cars Go", "Haïti", and "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" sounded like hope incarnate. "We are fuckin' through with the politics of division and fear," Butler spat before launching into "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)", and while I didn't quite believe him, at least I left wanting to.







Arcade Fire






Superchunk