From the start, Arcade Fire thrived from the position of having nothing to lose. You could hear it in the climax of "Neighborhood 1 (Tunnels)." You could tell this is a band that is laying everything out on the line, not afraid of tomorrow but embracing it. The band had since invented and re-invented itself, but the sentiment still remains. 'Neon Bible', but Win Butler sang about it like it was nobody's business. Then, there was 'The Suburbs', documenting the middle-class struggle that just begged for millennial think pieces to call it #WhitePeopleProblems, but Arcade Fire overcame. How? By making really good music.
And this might be the root for why "Reflektor " was treated so lukewarmly. This was not a band playing like they had nothing left to lose; they were playing it safe. They only dressed that up in the reflective sheen of their new sound. But the gilded sheen only goes so deep. With the exception of "Here Comes The Night Time," the first disc of "Reflektor " came off as static and stuffy. This was a band that wasn't going for broke but instead going along the lines. And maybe that's why the second disc was infinitely better. They stuck around long enough to eventually tune out the outside noise, stretch out a bit, and really expand.
And now they're at the dreaded album number five, already an Album Of The Year Grammy in. How can they possibly play like they have nothing to lose? Pull a Kanye with "Yeezus" and go "Soon as they like you/Make them unlike you." And this might have been one of the causes for the alienating satirical marketing campaign. This was not a band that did not diffuse the stakes so much as manually taking it down a couple notches. This was a band having fun, and maybe critics were too used to their supposed self-seriousness to realize that. "Everything Now" fidget spinners? How can you take that as anything more than a joke?
But Arcade Fire knows very well that the only way to overcome is by making really good music, and the newfound fearlessness makes this album so fascinating. The title track, "Everything Now", is an unabashed disco banger, It is the opposite of a stuffy "Reflektor" track; it's a widescreen, just gliding for the rest of the track with no stopping. "Signs Of Life" and "Creature Comfort" are so well-conceived that they could exist in their own respective universes. Yet, they still have tangential sonic and thematic resonances that make them cogs in some great machinery.
The second half looks more inward. The ethereal "Electric Blue" features a crazy singing performance by Regine Chassagne. Here, voice just becomes one of the instruments like Thom York's does in 'In Rainbows.' The song's sound stays true to its title, and it provides the perfect soundtrack to walking down the street at night on the way home from the party. Then, there's the shoegazy head-nodder "Put Your Money On Me." It has arguably the best hook of the album, and it's modest placement as the penultimate song in the album just shows how secure the band is with this record. Peppered throughout are auxiliary tracks "Peter Pan" and "We Don't Deserve Love" that aren't the most interesting melodically, but they stand alone on their sound, especially the latter.
But sometimes, sound alone just can't make a song stand up (as lyrics were a real downfall with this album). If it can't, the song will tumble down and then some, and that's the case for "Good God Damn" and, to a greater extent, "Chemistry." "Good God Damn" is the most minimalist song on the album, and its intentions to be introspective and momentous just don't come through. Instead, it comes off as the soundtrack to a whiskey commercial. Before listening to the album, I read on Reddit that "Chemistry" sounds like Arcade Fire performing from inside a clown car, and I admittedly can't disagree. But the low point of the album, from a standpoint of principle, has to be the "na na na" outro to "Everything Now." Arcade Fire took the sound of a live audience and put it into their album. Compared to the purity of the crescendo in "Wake Up", the one in "Everything Now' just sounds manufactured. On the other hand, despite the disco similarities to "Reflektor", "Everything Now" actually does bear the most resemblance to "Funeral." It's an album where the band has nothing left to lose, bringing everything back to square one. Now, that's what I call "reinventing" oneself. Rating:
