Arcade Fire’s Everything Now is a step to next level
If you’re thinking, as I have been, that this could be Arcade Fire’s U2 moment, look no further than one name that pops up deep into the liner notes of the Montreal band’s new album, Everything Now, due July 28: Daniel Lanois.
The Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer is forever tied to Bono & Co. for his production work alongside Brian Eno on the Irish band’s seminal albums, including The Joshua Tree.
Lanois pops up on two songs on Everything Now, which fall at slots 11 and 12 in the track listing. You might miss him on the hypnotic, synth-heavy Put Your Money On Me, but you can’t miss his trademark pedal steel guitar on bittersweet lament We Don’t Deserve Love.
Now, let’s not overstate things: Lanois is not a producer on either track. He’s just playing his pedal steel. But the symbolic significance of his inclusion — aside from being a nudge and a wink to a fellow Quebecer — is hard to miss.
After David Bowie and David Byrne, Bono was an early champion of Arcade Fire, when the band was blowing up on arrival, inviting the group to open two shows at the Bell Centre in November 2005.
A decade and change later — a best album Grammy (for the Suburbs, in 2011) in its pocket, and its indie-rock royalty status cemented — Arcade Fire appears finally, truly ready to make the leap to the next level.
Enter Thomas Bangalter (of chart-topping, electro-disco duo Daft Punk) and Steve Mackey (of ‘‘90s Brit-pop act Pulp), whose fingerprints are all over Everything Now, as co-producers alongside the band and old pal Markus Dravs.
The title track and opening single, released last month, set the tone with Abba-esque infectiousness and a timely message about information overload.
Arcade Fire tried to get groovy on 2013’s excellent but erratic Reflektor, co-produced by James Murphy of New York indie-electro act LCD Soundsystem. They focus their enthusiasm this time around, anchoring their sound around late-’70s, early-’80s new wave, while delivering some of the most unabashedly catchy hooks of their career.
The steady-bumping Signs of Life has a Talking Heads vibe, with lead singer Win Butler stepping outside his comfort zone, peppering Byrne-inspired yelps throughout as he sings of “cool kids, stuck in the past / In a world of cigarette ash.”
He gets sax support from Stuart Bogie, of Brooklyn Afrobeat ensemble Antibalas, and assistance on strings from longstanding collaborators Owen Pallett and Sarah Neufeld.
That mix of festivity and disaffection is a recurring theme. Butler chant-raps about boys, girls, body image and suicidal tendencies on the previously-leaked Creature Comfort. The fiery electro anthem finds Geoff Barrow, of British trip-hop legends Portishead, on synths and “additional production.”
Things get spicy with a pair of throwback ska jams: Peter Pan drifts on a bouncy stutter-step (with Bogie and Preservation Hall Jazz Band member Charlie Gabriel on horns) while Butler whispers an invitation of eternal youth (“Be my Wendy / I’ll be your Peter Pan) before things get weird ("Cause it’s a date night / Dead-eyed American Dream"). Meanwhile, dance-floor comeon Chemistry keeps things light, switching from an old-soul to a classic rock vibe with the midsong insertion of some Led Zep-worthy guitar riffs.
The band repeats the mash-up experiment with Infinite Content, delivered first as a soaring punk jam (Butler shouting, “Infinite content, infinite content / We’re infinitely content”), then revisited with tongue-in-cheek country languor that wouldn’t be out of place on The Suburbs, or a Wilco album.
Butler’s wife, Régine Chassagne, gets her moment to shine, cooing in incandescent falsetto over the Tom Tom Club bounce of Electric Blue. And Butler conjures Joe Strummer of the Clash on cool, head-bobber Good God Damn.
There is not, fans will be relieved to know, a weak track in the bunch.
Even more impressive is the fact that, en route to dance floor acceptance and major-label-sponsored broader appeal, the band has neither lost its identity nor sold its soul.
As funky as it gets, Everything Now never sounds like a Daft Punk album. Or a Pulp album. Or U2. But it finds Arcade Fire moving more freely than it ever has before, stepping into worlds we wouldn’t have previously expected and finding its place.
Changing with the times, in other words, without letting the times change them.
Butler is still a big lug, mining his and our lost innocence for inspiration, handing us a reality check as he drops another crowd-rousing anthem, ensuring that he and his unstoppable band have not completed their steady, ever-surprising ascent.
By the sounds of this, they’re just getting started.