New Age Dad is a band. Arcade Fire is a band.

New Age Dad is a band of tired dads, spastic toddlers, needy babies, black dogs, and sometimes moms. Arcade Fire is a band of young, zealous Canadians. The members of New Age Dad are hobbyists and have made no money with their music. Arcade Fire are professional musicians who are likely quite comfortable with the fame and fortune their music has attracted.

New Age Dad wrote a song called “Rococo.” Arcade Fire wrote a song called “Rococo.”

New Age Dad’s “Rococo” was cobbled together using salvaged scraps from tumultuous recording sessions that maneuvered around naps and feeding schedules, and was released in March of this year. Arcade Fire released their “Rococo” on the album Suburbs just this week.

New Age Dad’s “Rococo” has not been fondled by the press corp. Arcade Fire’s “Rococo” has been called a funeral dirge that, “moans alongside swirling delirious violins that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Disney cartoon,” and a “wake up call to the Obama generation.” Both songs feature a similar mantra,

Arcade Fire: “They’re saying rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo”

New Age Dad: “Rococo, rococo/never seemed like luck to me”

New Age Dad took the title “Rococo” from a review of an Ingmar Bergman movie in an old issue of the New Yorker. Ostensibly, Arcade Fire heard the word being used incorrectly by the “modern kids, downtown.”

New Age Dad’s “Rococo” is about the great nothing. Arcade Fire’s “Rococo” lampoons scene-obsessed youth; an offshoot of their clichéd theme of suburban dystopia. New Age Dad’s cliché—that of the artistic, involved dad—hangs over its entire catalog like a ragged veneer. New Age Dad lyrics are cobbled from old books of personal poetry using the cut-up method. Arcade Fire lyrics are forcibly poignant.

As a live act, Arcade Fire effuses sharpness and grandeur, but individual songs come across like a series of clammy, one-sided orgasms. New Age Dad has only played one song live, and no one was watching.

Arcade Fire has top-notch equipment and they know how to use it. New Age Dad records to GarageBand and sometimes sings out of tune. Arcade Fire boils hundreds of digital tracks down to vinyl and then rerecords to digital. New Age Dad is still figuring out what compression does.

If Arcade Fire called Pitchfork every day to discuss the weather, they would run it as news. If New Age Dad called it quits tomorrow, the world would be none the wiser.

Arcade Fire demands to be taken seriously. New Age Dad does not, but we do demand to be taken.