I will NOT write an essay about Arcade Fire winning Album of the Year.

The title of this, that's what I said to myself Sunday night after seeing Twitter explode (both positively and negatively) regarding Arcade Fire winning the Grammy for Album of the Year for their 2010 record The Suburbs.

It's going to be too overdone. There will be nothing left to say. All of my music critic friends are already making snarky jokes about it. Those were the justifications I whispered to myself.

See, on Sunday night, I live tweeted the Grammys without actually watching the Grammys. Part of this was because I like live-tweeting, part of it was because I don't like watching the Grammys, and part of it was a sort of social experiment, devised to see how much of the pomp and circumstance can come through in a parade of like-minded people speaking in 140 characters about the same event.

Hit the break for more.

Top 50 Songs of 2010, Part Three: 30-21

NUMBER THIRTY

I have not been quiet about my distaste for the last two Arcade Fire records relative to their debut masterpiece Funeral. Like Neon Bible before it, 2010's AF release The Suburbs was too mid-tempo, too quiet, too slow, too ho-hum for me to really connect with it in a meaningful way. More troubling are the songs, littered across both Bible and Suburbs, that call to mind Funeral's towering highs. "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" is one of those tracks. Though only carrying a little more shuffle than most of the humdrum album, "Sprawl II"'s engaging synth lines and vivacious Regine Chassagne vocal painted the suburban escape as somehow epic, where looking past the retail mountains beyond mountains was a glance through the looking glass.

Go beyond the click for numbers twenty-nine through twenty-one.

Minimalism and Movie Previews

Minimalism is an interesting artistic concept. Essentially, the idea of minimalism is to take the medium you're working in and strip it down to its most basic elements, removing an extraneous data to get to the core of what you're working with and what you're trying to say. Its principles stretch from painting to sculpture, from music to architecture and, lately, when I've been thinking of the term minimalism, I've been thinking about it in terms of movie previews.

Let me explain after the jump.