Arcade Fire - In The Attic (2001)

Win Butler and Josh Deu founded Arcade Fire in Montreal around 2001, having first met at Phillips Exeter Academy as high school students. Butler and Deu's musical ideas began to develop while they both moved to different universities, and it was while rehearsing at McGill University that they met Régine Chassagne (who married Win Butler in 2003), a music student who they asked to join them. The trio recorded a set of demos and began performing live in the second half of 2001, with the band consisting of Butler, Chassagne, Deu, together with multi-instrumentalist Tim Kile, bassist Myles Broscoe, guitarist/drummer Dane Mills, and multi-instrumentalist Brendan Reed. The initial Montreal structure of the band began to dissolve in the summer of 2002, when they traveled to Butler's family farm on Mount Desert Island, Maine to record their self-titled EP, with tension between Butler and Broscoe leading to the latter's dismissal following the recording session. Richard Reed Parry, who had been enlisted to help the band record, began to collaborate with them during the sessions and would go on to join the band shortly afterwards. Around the same time, Joshua Deu left to resume his studies, and in 2003 the band celebrated the release of the EP with a show at Montreal's Casa del Popolo, where an explosive argument between Butler and Reed led to both Reed and Mills quitting the band, and so Butler's brother William and Tim Kingsbury were brought in to replace Reed and Mills so that the band could continue. Howard Bilerman joined the band on drums in the summer of 2003, and they began to play shows together, recording the album that would end up becoming their ground-breaking debut 'Funeral', released on Merge Records in 2004. This album goes back to their roots, consisting of the ten songs from those 2001 demos, none of which have ever appeared on any of their official releases, and including the track which gave them their name. 

Track listing

01 Winter For A Year
02 My Mind Is A Freeway
03 Accidents
04 Goodnight Boy
05 Asleep At The Wheel
06 In The Attic
07 Can't Let Go Of You
08 You Tried To Run Away
09 Instrumental
10 The Great Arcade Fire