Arcade Fire are a Canadian indie band. They played a concert in Austria with Swedish-Argentinian folk singer José González.

[José González]

It seems that this year is the year where I see bands again that I saw at the Frequency Festival 3 years ago. José González is one of them. Unfortunately we got to the concert a bit late (for various reasons) and he was already playing when we arrived.

He still has the same magic going as he did three years ago: He sits all alone on the big stage with his guitar and he should seem lost and lonely, but he’s so focussed on his playing and he has such a presence that he pulls you in and he fills all the available space.

And fortunately we didn’t arrive too late that I missed my favorite songs, like Heartbeats and Teardrop. And I’m aware that I’m only citing cover songs here, but when somebody covers Kylie Minogue like this:

What can you do? But his original songs are wonderful, too. Like this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wppll7UYFVs&feature=related

In short, it was a wonderful concert and would have probably been enough to make for a great evening.

But we were lucky enough that it was only the beginning of this night and not the end, since the main act of the evening were Arcade Fire.

I’m a little late to the Arcade Fire party – it actually took me until The Suburbs to really fall in love with them. But this album did it perfectly.

And their concert was awesome. They had a couple of video clips – from The Suburbs – and a few video installations which I have to admit I mostly ignored – too much input. But that was about the only thing that wasn’t really my thing.

Their setlist was great, well paced and a nice balance between old and new.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLjrQ3cwzJ4

The whole thing was happening in a tent and it was pretty hot and most of all humid, so deadra and me soon made our way from pretty close to the stage to the back – otherwise it would have been pretty unbearable. We ended up close to a couple of guys who were not only sweet enough to let us stand in front of them (since they were a good bit taller than deadra and me), but who were thoughtful enough to offer it to us. And I was all prepared that they were trying to hit on us with that, but apparently they were just being nice (or the worst flirters ever). I don’t know whether I should be happy or disappointed about that. :)
In any case it was extremely nice and it is so very rare to stumble upon just general niceness that it really impressed me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSykB-j_2UQ

Summarising: a great evening.