BUILDING ROCK’S FUTURE
The meaning of Arcade Fire
WITH Arcade Fire’s release Friday of its new album, “Everything Now,” the music world exhales. “Everything Now” is arguably the most highly-anticipated rock record of the year. Its lead single (the title track) has already hit No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart, and pre-release hype alone guarantees it will sell.
But I suspect it will also be a very controversial release, not so much because of the quality of the music, but rather because of who Arcade Fire is, who the band used to be and what some critics mulishly wish it still was.
The truth is this: Arcade Fire is the most important North American group making music today.
The Montreal-based band led by guitarist/vocalist Win Butler and French-Haitian multinstrumentalist Régine Chassagne is a family affair: Butler and Chassagne are married, and Butler’s younger brother Will is also part of the group alongside guitarist Richard Reed-Parry, bassist Tim Kingsbury, drummer Jeremy Gara and a string section frontline, all of whom have known one another for over a decade and a half.
Imagine a modern-rock version of The Band, with the communal multi-instrumental swapping, US/Canadian cultural interplay, subconscious emotional power and conscious striving for grandeur that comparison entails. Arcade Fire shows are famous for their sweaty catharsis, and the band’s track record (beginning with its 2004 debut Funeral, a consensus pick as one of the most important records of the 2000s) is fiercely compelling. While its indierock competitors fell away, Arcade Fire kept going.
Yet, it’s the band’s turning away from those indie-rock roots, towards a musical style centered around dance music, deep grooves and electro-pop that has generated controversy in recent years.
All great bands are like sharks: the minute they stop moving forward, they die creatively. And while Arcade Fire has arguably always been a Secret Dance Band (you can hear it on the band’s debut LP), it was only with 2013’s “Reflektor” that they openly embraced their love of the groove.
“Everything Now” strengthens that embrace under the production of Steve Mackay. While this has been greeted with jeers by those who hunger for “Funeral, Pt. 2,” it more properly seems like the sound of a band that has refused to indulge in the financial rewards of artistic complacency.
The easy game to play is to liken Arcade Fire’s records to those of its illustrious predecessors, since no great band of the last 20 years has more proudly and openly worn its influences on its musical sleeve. But it’s ultimately a cheap gimmick because it sells short the originality and bracing honesty of the band’s music and lyrics.
Saying that “Everything Now” (the title track) sounds like Abba or that “Creature Comfort” feels like a direct descendant of “Power, Corruption & Lies”-era New Order merely signals vague referents; it tells you nothing about what makes these songs great.
What’s so invigorating about these songs is the thrill of hearing the natural pulse and feel that comes from an actual band, playing together in a room, combined with clever post-production, overdubbing and editing. The lonely midnight stroll of “Electric Blue,” whose keening wail scans as Chassagne’s tribute to David Bowie, is a masterpiece of editing and mixing, but also a tribute to a band whose members are listening intently to one another. The music argues not only for melody and for rhythm but for live instrumental alchemy.
Win Butler and Chassagne take their lyrical thematics seriously, which sometimes is at odds with their direct (and occasionally overly blunt) approach. On Everything Now, the post-Millennial hangover vibe first explored on 2010’s “The Suburbs” has curdled over into open disaffection with the plastic, commodified instantgratification culture of the social-media era (the album’s title is quite on the nose).
It’s a conceit worthy of our times, but does lead to a few misfires: “Chemistry” is a failed hybrid of Jamaican dancehall and hard rock whose intentionally simplistic lyrics highlight the emptiness of its music. Meanwhile, “Infinite Content” is a conceit in search of a song: two-part piece that veers from thrash punk to country but seems to have been put at the center of the record less as a musical statement (nice guitars, though) than as an archly ironic statement of vapidity.
But the rest of this album impresses hugely, and in doing so reaffirms why Arcade Fire is our continent’s most interesting band: “Put Your Money On Me” is the single most impressive song on the record, a compulsively danceable hybrid of electronic and organic sound that develops into cascading round of call-and-response vocals weaving around the center of an unshakeable pulse. And the closer, “We Don’t Deserve Love,” fuses the old anthemic Arcade Fire ballad style with Kevin Shields’ guitar and a click-track beat, providing not only a fitting conclusion for the record, but a musical synthesis of the band’s career.
Why does Everything Now matter? The answer to that question also answers this: Why does any album release in the age of instant Internet gratification matter? It matters because people out there are still determined to make art that breaks through on more than an ephemeral level. We may be leaving the age of the Album Artist. But Arcade Fire isn’t — yet. It’s still fighting for the medium as something that can fuse both mass appeal and enduring relevance.