Arcade Fire up 70s art rock... but still can’t ignite
ARCADE FIRE: We (Columbia)
Verdict: Smoulders without scorching ★★★☆☆
SOFT CELL: *Happiness Not
Included (BMG) Verdict: Exhilarating return ★★★★☆ SIGRID: How To Let Go (Island) Verdict: Solid sophomore effort ★★★☆☆
David Bowie was a fan and Coldplay’s Chris Martin calls them ‘the greatest group in history’. But while arcade Fire are one of the world’s biggest bands, they can be guilty of taking themselves too seriously.
They are at it again on their sixth album, we. among the weighty topics they choose to address are a sense of universal apprehension and the loss of american identity.
one track mentions a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius a*, that exists at the centre of our galaxy.
if all of that suggests we is heavy going, it is . . . at least in places.
But arcade Fire, who formed in Montreal in 2001, also have an ability to mix such high-minded themes with swaggering hooks and lavish arrangements and there are plenty of those in here, too — despite the lack of a glittering pop moment to rival 2017’s everything Now single.
in reality, what we have here is an old-fashioned, 1970s-style artrock album. There are sly nods to Bowie and a cameo from former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel. The presence of the artful Father John Misty as an additional producer (he also adds ‘stomps and breaths’) does little to dial down the grandiosity.
We iS what a football pundit might call an album of two halves, its seven songs tracing an arc from darkness into light. The first half, rooted in loneliness, carries the weight of the world on its shoulders.
The second, fuelled by the postlockdown euphoria of reconnecting with loved ones, looks on the brighter side.
at the heart of it all lies the sextet’s whirling carousel of sound, a blend of electronic and acoustic instruments that incorporates guitar, drums, brass and strings. The singing is shared between win Butler and his wife Regine Chassagne. Keeping it in the family, there’s even some harp from Butler’s mum, Liza Rey. a sense of foreboding overshadows the opening section. ‘Gotta get this spirit out of me, this anxiety that’s inside of me,’ cautions Butler on age of anxiety i.
The four-part suite end of The empire i-iv takes in everything from the decline of american power to a desire to unsubscribe from streaming services. it’s all a little pretentious. The high points come thicker and faster on side two. The Lightning is a twoparter that starts as a stately piano ballad before switching to a Springsteen-esque rocker. ‘The black sky turns back to indigo,’ sings Butler, reflecting the mood change. it’s overblown . . . but impossible to resist.
after all the bombast, there’s some welcome light relief in another two-part number, Unconditional i and ii. The first section, subtitled Lookout Kid, is a folky love letter to Butler and Chassagne’s son edwin. Part two, with Gabriel duetting with Regine, is a sunny love song reminiscent of Talking Heads disco offshoot Tom Tom Club.
Mapped out in lockdown — ‘the longest we’ve ever spent writing’ — we feels like the work of a band over-thinking things. it’s hard to fault their ambition, but my hunch is that these simmering songs will only fully ignite once arcade Fire get back on the road. n wiTH hits such as Tainted Love and Bedsitter, Soft Cell shaped British electronic music in the 1980s. But singer Marc almond and instrumentalist dave Ball have never been particularly prolific, which makes the release of their fifth album so welcome. only their second LP in 38 years, *Happiness Not included revisits all the ingredients that made them so influential in their heyday. almond’s voice is warm and relatable, his lyrics dotted with humour. Ball’s synthpowered whooshes and bleeps are lively and tuneful without being overbearing.
Highlights abound. Happy Happy Happy and New eden look at how yesterday’s futuristic sci-fi visions have failed to come to fruition. The duo, who first met as art students in Leeds, were going to call this album Future Nostalgia, but were thwarted when dua Lipa beat them to the punch.
They still write engagingly about soldiering on, even when things don’t turn out as expected.
THe beautifully-sung Light Sleepers is an affectionate portrait of Californian night owls that is the musical equivalent of an edward Hopper painting. The droll Polaroid documents an underwhelming encounter with andy warhol in 1980s New York.
There’s kitsch dance music, too, in Nostalgia Machine, which namechecks both david essex’s motorbike film Silver dream Racer and Hawkwind’s Silver Machine.
Best of all, Purple Zone is a soaring duet between almond and Neil Tennant that unites the UK’s biggest synth duo (Pet Shop Boys) and its most influential (Soft Cell). n THe ‘difficult second album’ became even more troublesome for Sigrid when the Scandinavian singer found herself being flown from La back to her childhood bedroom in Norway during lockdown. Torn between home comforts and a jet-setting life, she grew pensive and introspective.
The result is a follow-up to 2019’s dynamic Sucker Punch that reasserts her pop star credentials — she’s a powerhouse singer — but is uneven. Sigrid, 25, shines on the sprightly Mirror, harking back to the electronics of her 2017 Top 10 hit Strangers.
experiments with more guitaroriented material are hit-andmiss. it Gets dark, about accepting tough times and moving on, is a generic rock ballad, but Bad Life, an unlikely duet with Bring Me The Horizon singer oli Sykes, shows her versatility.
‘it’s just a bad day, not a bad life,’ she sings, still very much on the rise.