Released almost a year ago on July 28, 2017 Arcade Fire's most resent album holds true to the sound and style of previous albums (think "The Suburbs" circa 2010 and "Funeral" circa 2004) while also introducing a new funky flare. The most striking thing about the album is the way each songs seems to sneak up on you when you listen to them. There's a certain morbid and melancholy tone to the whole album, trademark of the band, but each song carries a hesitantly happy tune. Such as, the song that is the namesake of the whole album "Everything Now", which criticizes society's cultural norm of mass consumerism and growing materialism; yet, the song has the happiest, most upbeat tune of the whole album. Throughout the whole song the phrase "Everything now!" is constantly repeated, showing how what many of us perceive as "everything", such as big houses and expensive cars and a massive amounts of possessions, are in actuality not "everything."
Similar to their album "The Suburbs", the trademark song of "Everything Now" also has an accompanying song by, yes you guessed it the same name, that both introduces and finishes the album. Now, this may seem very confusing at first, but after listening to the album all the way through it is very easy to distinguish between the three different songs all titled "Everything Now." And although they are all titled "Everything Now" they do have little differences to their names, the song that opens the album holds the title "Everything_Now (continued)" while the song "Everything Now" follows right after, and the song that ends the album is called "Everything Now (continued)." This may seem exhaustive and unnecessary to have three separate songs all carry heavily similar titles; however, in actuality the song titles themselves become a comment to the themes of the album. Exploring the theme of individuality in the sense of to what extent does a name warrant commonality. Does the title of a song have to be different for the song itself to be different? It is a fundamental idea that many people take for granted, while Arcade Fire chooses to challenge it.
Within the album there is also two songs titled "Infinite Content", the first holding the name "Infinite Content" while the second, which immediately follows the first, is titled "Infinite_Content." The dazzling effect of these two songs is the have (nearly) the same title and the same lyrics, but a completely different tune and therefore, a wholly different impact when listening to them. The first song is brash with heavy guitar riffs and more of an angry shouting than singing, while the second is a slow, acoustic mellow-singing version of the song that preceded it. Both songs play on the words "infinite content" commenting how we are all "infinitely content with infinite content", here the theme of mass consumerism comes into play in a very interesting way.
Usually when mass consumerism is brought up it is in association with big business such as Amazon, yet here mass consumerism is being taken in the context of social media. Commenting how we are all slaves to the infinite content, we post, see posted, comment, like, follow, and subscribe too. Now, I am not saying that going on social media is a bad thing at all because that would just make me incredibly hypocritical considering I am on social media constantly. What I am trying to say though is that it is refreshing to be reminded that we don't just need to become slaves to all this "infinite content" that is available at the touch of a finger (quite literally) to us all. We shouldn't just become "infinitely content" engaging with posts on social media and forget about actions that can be made in real-life.
Although this album came out a year ago, the theme of being "infinitely content" with "infinite content" is still present in society today. Social media may be a catalyst for people to learn about atrocious events and acts going on in the world but it shouldn't make people content to just know what is going on, it should become a platform to invoke real change in the real world through substantial actions.
So, no matter if you have listened to the most recent Arcade Fire album "Everything Now" yet or not, it is never too late to tune it or even give it a re-listen. You may just find new meaning within each of the songs (if the same name titles do not mix you up), find new appreciation in all the themes bursting within the album, or discover a new favorite song.
