Arcade Fire: WE (Columbia)
The band’s new epic invites comparisons with rock’s all-time greats, says Neil Mccormick
Arcade Fire make other bands look like they are not trying hard enough. From the panache of their packaging to the integration of every fine musical and lyrical detail, you can depend upon the Canadianamerican ensemble to offer thematically coherent works of vaunting ambition, characterised by big ideas, grand emotions and cinematic scope. WE is their sixth album, and every bit as good as their best.
While continuing to explore themes of desensitisation and distraction in an over-stimulated world, musically Arcade Fire have rowed back from the sonic overload of Reflektor (2013) and
Everything Now (2017). Featuring layers of acoustic instruments and lush orchestrations buoyed by stirring backing vocals, WE is evocative of 2004’s baroque indie rock debut
Funeral and 2010’s sprawling masterpiece The Suburbs, with some of the dark electronic drive of 2007’s
Neon Bible.
The lush sound offers reassuring warmth, even as the songs grapple with intense philosophical and emotional doubts. Presented as two parts labelled I and WE (which in the days of vinyl would divide neatly into sides one and two), the first half strikes an epic yet elegiac tone.
In a phrase borrowed from late Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, frontman Win Butler sets the scene on Age of Anxiety (I and II), shifting from a tumultuous account of dislocation amid a culture of solipsism (“It’s a maze of mirrors / It’s a hologram of a ghost / You can’t quite touch it / Which is what hurts the most”) to a slippery anthem of internet paranoia subtitled Rabbit Hole.
As the Roman numerals suggest, WE
features suites of songs, with the glorious End of Empire contemplating the decline of America in six sections. Never afraid of being viewed as pretentious, the band include allusions to Dante in the set up: “Midway through life / Virgil said let’s take a ride / You’ll need a divine guide / ’Cause this inferno’s hyperdrive.” Yet there is welcome playfulness in Butler’s interactions with multiinstrumentalist wife and co-writer, Régine Chassagne, who voices the scrolling siren luring us to distracted doom before Butler rallies with “We unsubscribe! / F*** season five!”
The second half builds to thunderous release with songs propounding values of community, parenthood, love and empathy as a shield against the hardships of existence. With a running time of 40 minutes, WE is a tightly condensed work that makes use of repeated motifs, an approach apparently inspired by the comparative brevity of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
Indeed, classic concept artists of the progressive rock era offer an interesting touchstone on an album that evokes something of the mad ambition of Pete Townshend’s rock operatics with The Who.
The distinctive voice of Genesis founder Peter Gabriel can be heard on Unconditional II (Race and Religion),
while the cosmic-human cover has been airbrushed by Terry Pastor, an artist who worked on David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. With a work as ambitious and boldly realised as WE,
Arcade Fire know they have nothing to fear by inviting comparison to rock’s all-time greats.
Also out Soft Cell: Happiness Not Included (BMG); Warpaint: Radiate Like This (Virgin); Sigrid: How to Let Go
(Island); Sharon Van Etten: We’ve Been Going About this All Wrong
(Jagjaguwar); Emeli Sandé: Let’s Say for Instance (Chrysalis); The Waterboys: All Souls Hill (Cooking Vinyl)