The Arcade Fire
Neon Bible
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The Arcade Fire
Neon Bible
Merge, 2007
RiYL: Bruce Springsteen, U2, Broken Social Scene |
That's a little strange when you think about it, because for all its pomp and sweep, Funeral was an intensely personal record, concerned mostly with the tragic beauty of lovers trapped in untenable situations and the inexplicably poetic tendency of humans to persevere even and especially when logic dictates they best not. Only "Haiti" really qualified as a political song, and its ambitions were quite undercut by Regine Chassagne's delivery of the melody in an offhand lullaby coo and an arrangement dominated by what sounded like a malfunctioning Mellotron.
Neon Bible by contrast is so very much swept up in Major Statements that there are parts of it that are well-nigh unlistenable. When lead fretter Win Butler bleats "World War III, when are you coming for me?" at the climax to "Windowsill," you want to fly right up to Quebec and slap him for being so unsubtle. Likewise, while the subtitled sequence of "Neighborhood" songs on Funeral allowed The Arcade Fire to work a bit of a running storyline through that record while still having time for comparatively cheery diversions, the parentheses that surround the title to "(Antichrist Television Blues)" on Neon Bible serve no master but pure unchecked pretension. Multiple songs on Bible use church organ as their primary instrumental voice, and there's hardly a moment past the thin bands between tracks that isn't strangled by string arrangements and choir vocals.
That's not to say The Arcade Fire have completely lost their touch. "The Well and the Lighthouse," the most Funeral-like of the new tracks, is a deftly clever allegory about a man with no good choice to make. Do you stay at your post and condemn yourself to a life of loneliness, or do you go out into the real world and cause horrible wrecks to pile up on the beach? The pleasing first half of "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations" is almost new wave, before Butler resentfully takes over on vocals from Chassagne and the tempo slows to the death march pace at which way, way too much of Neon Bible drags by. "No Cars Go," the lone escapist fantasy on the new record, is effective here in a bells and whistles-heavy new arrangement, but it's no improvement on the 2003 EP original.
However, those are the exceptions. The rule here is ponderous, overconsidered pity drones like "Black Mirror," "Intervention," and the unintentionally hysterical "My Body Is a Cage," which wraps things up on such a bleak tone (particularly compared to Funeral's mixed-positive finisher "In the Backseat") that it's got to be a joke of some kind. With a band of such unlimited ambition as The Arcade Fire it seems almost beside the point to criticize the instrumental performances, but much of Neon Bible is marred by sluggish drumming and the use of many more instruments than is necessary without giving them much at all interesting to do. Since that first EP The Arcade Fire have divided into separate entities in the studio and on stage, which seems curious since their reputation as a live band is formidable. Neon Bible is such an effective counterargument against the principle of More Is More that it could be the basis for an entire lecture in Sophomore Slump Avoidance 101.
That said, The Arcade Fire in the desolate indie rock scene of 2007 are like the St. Louis Cardinals in the NL Central this year. They're not great by any stretch, but who else is any better? They've earned the right to keep our attention through a bad album or two, and while I certainly won't be putting Neon Bible into heavy rotation after completing this review, that fact doesn't make me any less fond of Funeral.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.