[Albums] Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

Wherein I am one of three people on the planet who actually isn't very excited about the new release from our friends up north:

On first blush, I didn't much like any of Arcade Fire's new album Neon Bible. Even for them it seemed a bit overblown and strained. I put it down and didn't come back to it for a few weeks. Upon my return I realized that buried underneath the overbearing and uninspired first half of this album is at least solid single's worth of new material.

Opener "Black Mirror" when A/B'd with "Neighborhood #1" from Funeral comes off flat and sour. "Keep the Car Running" makes me think of Robert Smith hugging Midnight Oil - it makes me afraid. The title-track is repetitive (but mercifully short) and "Intervention" aims high but trips all over some clumsy lyrics and a rather hollow performance by Win Butler.

"Black Wave / Bad Vibrations" is my dividing line for the album. The first half, Regine's half, is poorly mixed, bass heavy, and ill-conceived - which is unfortunate because honestly I prefer her voice over Butler's. By this point I'm ready to quit listening to the album yet again.

Fortunately, the very first stanza of the "Bad Vibrations" half is easily the most evocative on the album up to this point, and the music is the sound of a storm's rolling thunder - a perfect set up for "Ocean of Noise", easily the best song on Neon Bible.

"Ocean" does what all of my favorite Arcade Fire songs do, which is to take a familar old motif and update it to accompany modern paranoia. To my ears it sounds like a "Killing Moon"/"Red Right Hand" rip off, but it is a very very good one with a coda to match anything they have ever written. The sequencing here is key to how this half of the album plays out, because when "The Well and the Lighthouse" starts, it kicks you in the stomach and runs away.

"(Antichrist Television Blues)" is a point of annoyance and a signal for more rough water ahead. Butler specifically mentions 9/11, and makes what I feel is the most Dylan-esque thing Arcade Fire has done - neither of which I might add are positive for me. At all. Regine's vocal bridge is weird as hell and almost saves the song for me. But hey, I didn't really like "7 Kettles" so much, so I can excuse a lull.

Things pick up a little on "Windowsill" which is (ironically) a musical cousin to "7 Kettles", but more desperate and affecting: "The tide is high and rising still", fortells the apocalypse. We probably ought to "Keep the Car Running" so we can escape easier. However, Butler deserves a kick in the shin for the line: "I don't want to live in America no more." You don't live in America. You don't. We all know that. If you are paranoid about living Next to America, then by all means write about that. It works better for us because it sounds more honest.

"No Cars Go" is an old song - circa 2002 - and no amount of synthesizer can cover that up, because it is by far the most interesting thing on Black Mirror. Too bad Win phones in his vocal performance again, replete with lackluster "Hey!"s and an cringe-worthy modulation on the third chorus. It's still better than most of the rest of the album. Closer "My Body is a Cage" is pretty rousing stuff, as Arcade Fire throw the gospel at us. While not spectacular, it makes an appropriate denouement.

Ultimately, Neon Bible is missing much of the enthusiasm and tightly packed arrangements of Funeral, and thus falls short of the hair-raising impact of that album. I do appreciate the attempt by the band to not make Funeral: Part 2, but they've taken a pretty sharp turn towards entirely remapping the past without their own peculiar twists - and seem to be struggling to find their unique voice again.