The Arcade Fire played a 5,000 seat venue in Charlottesville, Virgina last week and it couldn't have been a better place for them to deliver their songs about the perils of suburban life and the modern world. Sure, C'ville is home to UVA, and that part of town is a gorgeous hamlet full of kudzu covered Jeffersonian architecture. But head to the North and there's nothing but shopping malls framed on all sides by the Blue Ridge mountains. "Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains and there's no end in sight" indeed. The band was thinking about Houston, TX when they wrote The Suburbs, but the messages contained within it's songs could just as easily been about this smallish Virginia college town.

Now, on to the show...