How would it be to exist without music?
I for one would have no clue, and I don’t want to try imagining it, or even write much more along those lines. But it is, perhaps, worth asking a related question: how would it be to exist without excellent music, or even very good music? For me, this has been the question of the week. And you can blame Arcade Fire for that.
I’ve been following this Montreal-based bunch since their highly acclaimed debut Funeral (2004). Using the phrase ‘highly acclaimed’ in this context is hardly new or surprising – it seems that when Arcade Fire simply get out of bed in the morning there’s cause for rapturous excitement around the world, the sort of rapturous excitement that once greeted The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan (the crusty old shit that he’s become), David Bowie, Nirvana, and, erm, U-bloody-2.
But is Arcade Fire really that good?
There’s no doubt that when they’re fully charged they’re excellent. Witness ‘Neighbourhood No. 2’ and ‘Wake Up’ from Funeral, ‘Intervention’ and ‘No Cars Go’ from Neon Bible (2007), and ‘The Suburbs’, ‘Ready to Start’, ‘Modern Man’ and ‘Suburban War’ from The Suburbs (2010). One day Arcade Fire are going to put out a best-of that’s going to knock the socks off people and prove once and for all how great – and ‘great’ is the word – they can be.
However, and this is a big ‘however’: they can also be utterly infuriating.
Some Arcade Fire songs start brilliantly before burning out as though in the end they just didn’t know what to do with them but, hey, chuck it on the record anyway. The band can pack too many ideas into each song (certainly Reflektor suffers from this in parts), and lyrically they can be as awfully obtuse as a Sixth Form poet inspired only by Google. Throw into the mix the fact that they’re fueled by both anger and beauty, they appear to adore and detest modern life in equal measures, and they can be grand, dramatic, over-dramatic, over-blown even, but there’s also a deep vein of melancholia throughout. A rich brew or a directionless mess? They’re both, quite honestly.
So. What to make of this latest record?
In a way it’s exactly what you’d expect. This is, apparently, Arcade Fire’s dance collection and they enlisted LCD Soundsytem’s James Murphy to get their hips a-wigglin’. Appropriately split over two discs, and inspired by the 1950 Brazilian classic Black Orpheus and its themes of death and isolation, Win Butler, wife Régine Chassagne, and the couple’s clever cohorts lead us from the superb ‘Reflektor’ – this is their ‘Atomic’ – through ‘You Already Know’, which sounds like what would happen if Butler fronted The Smiths and Queen, and the almost Clash-like ‘Joan of Arc’.
On the second disc the pairing of ‘Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)’ and ‘It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)’ shows just how close Arcade Fire is getting to John Lennon, in ambition if not execution. ‘Porno’, the most James Murphy-esque track, is a fine slice of moody electro, and ‘Afterlife’ is one of those typically exasperating Arcade Fire songs: a gorgeous verse, a glorious chorus, it’s all ‘Can we work it out?/If we scream and shout till we work it out?/Can we just work it out?/If we scream and shout till we work it out?’, and then, and then – well, it just collapses under its own weight.
Referencing a bunch of great bands and singer/songwriters here is intentional, including The Smiths and The Clash. Is Reflektor as good as the former’s The Queen is Dead or the latter’s London Calling? No, it’s not. But it’s dangerously close. It has the scope, depth, audacity, and a burning desire to create something as timelessly artful as those albums. In some ways it also feels like the best mix-tape you could ever possibly receive (the inclusion on the second disc of the test-sound once found on cassettes alludes to this) and, perhaps, in the age of iTunes, YouTube, and Spotify, Reflektor is as good as it gets.
A magnificently flawed masterpiece. Yes, let’s call it that.
And I can’t stop listening to it.
7 comments
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November 16, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Nov
stuart barnes
I’ve never given this band the time of day … on reading this, I will … MFM: a new acronym?
November 16, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Nov
Nigel Featherstone
There’s a stack to like on this album – it is certainly rich and urgent and vital. There’s also courage in its messy, devil-may-care attitude. Others have written that there’s a bit of Kid A and Achtung Baby going on. But Reflektor is far superior to those records. So, yeah, definitely check it out!
November 21, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Nov
stuart
Nigel … Kid A & Achtung Baby are two of my favourite records … quite like messy, devil-may-care … i’ve ordered Reflektor; shall let you know my thoughts
November 19, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Nov
Gabrielle Bryden
You do a good review Nigel 🙂 you should be on JJJ (they have one segment where the dj’s dad does a weekly review of the latest albums – which cracks me up because he always says it like it should be said)
November 20, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Nov
Nigel Featherstone
Well, Gabe, that’d be a dream come true!
November 22, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Nov
Nigel Featherstone
Hi Stuart, I’ll be interested to hear what you think of ‘Reflektor’. As to ‘Kid A’: yeap brilliant, though not, I’ve discovered, good for driving – I tend to zone out and find myself heading across paddocks. ‘Achtung Baby’? Something just puts me off mid- and/or late-period U2. I know that makes me sound like an 80s hipster (did they even exist?) but, as far as I’m concerned, as soon as a band member meets with the US President, it all goes down hill from there. But, geez, hasn’t that band written some amazing songs?
January 3, 2014 at 9:16+00:00Jan
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