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Arcade Fire
Neon Bible
Rough Trade
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Article
written by Adam W
Mar 19, 2007.
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Arcade Fire are not just a band – they’re a phenomenon. Funeral won the hearts and minds of critics and indie fans at home and abroad in a manner unseen since The Strokes’ explosion into the mainstream in 2001, and their ability to sell out 4 nights at London’s Brixton Academy in the blink of a tear-stained eye further highlights their contemporary importance. The success of Funeral was the success of an acutely emotional approach to making music and a simple brilliance in songcraft. Power Out and Rebellion (Lies) are quite simply two of the most staggering songs ever written. Fact. Although Funeral’s power came from the fact that it was inseperable from the much-referenced familial deaths that had engulfed the band during its writing. Therefore, their charged and over-the-top emotional battering was justified because we all know just how horrible it is when someone we love dies. The sometimes clunky wordplay and potentially cloying sentiments were accepted and, crucially, they worked due to the external referents (death and tragedy) that constructed the record being as relevant to the experience as the songs themselves.
Neon Bible is cut from very much the same black, aching cloth as Funeral. Win Butler still howls (and I mean HOWLS) his anguish over the band’s bombastic backing of rampant guitars, booming drums, shrieking strings and, now, added church organ. However, this time around, there is no referent. There is no similar source for Win’s eternally-tortured ruminations on his own and the world’s collective misery. This means that Neon Bible simply doesn’t work because unless you buy into their bleak worldview and personal anguish then this becomes a tiresome, difficult and ultimately disappointing listen.
Musically, Arcade Fire are an incredible band but the quality of the songwriting on display here isn’t really anything special. 75% of this album is essentially the same, songs that are nowhere near the melodic brilliance of Funeral are drenched in loud guitars, strings, organs and pained vocals which although sounds incredible in places, doesn’t really hold up to repeated listens. Butler’s lyrics are the key problem, as he chastises the world and his own state of mind with the subtlety and metaphoric clumsiness of a 16-year-old “emo” kid. “Mirror mirror on the wall, tell me where the bombs will fall” is just one example of this trite lyricism. Sometimes the production swells majestically enough to cover up the flaws in songwriting, sometimes it sounds like there is a classic album in here somewhere but ultimately… there isn’t.
There are some fantastic moments on here, there really are. Keep the Car Running is a brilliantly catchy and subtle piece of new-wave pace-upping, and Ocean of Noise explodes into a piece of wonderful orchestral majesty that only a band as stupidly talented as this are capable of. It also ends strongly, with re-recorded older song No Cars Go providing a fantasticly angry, chaotic and grandiose climax to proceedings… except it doesn’t. Neon Bible should have ended here, but Arcade Fire deem it a better idea to end on the cloying whingefest My Body is a Cage instead… sigh.
It is a shame to report that Arcade Fire have produced an album which is essentially a beautifully engineered and orchestrated piece of frustration and averageness. For all the critical support so far of this album, it will sink to the bottom of people’s CD racks, unplayed, for a very long time to come. However what Neon Bible does do, despite the criticisms, is keep the spark of the Arcade Fire phenomenon very much alive. This may be a flawed and rather underwhelming album but the sound, the emotion and the faint glimmers of songwriting genius that are on display here still have people like me salivating at the prospect of what they are going to do next.
Untitled Document
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