Released July 28, 2017
5.5 / 10
Favorites
Everything_Now (continued), Everything Now, Put Your Money On Me, We Don't Deserve Love, Everything Now (continued)
Least favorites
Creature Comfort, Chemistry, Infinite Content, Infinite_Content (continued)
On their sixth studio album, Arcade Fire further push the envelope of genre-fluidity but they stumble with a sense of misplaced nostalgia that results in a piece crucially void of subtlety permeated by a couple moments of ceremonial clarity. The July 2017 LP surfs on waves of alt rock, indie sound and disco with the help of producers Thomas Bangalter (Daft Punk) and Steve Mackey (Pulp). The resulting sound is very unequal, glorious at times and tripping on itself regularly. The influences from which the instrumentals borrow make for a hard feat to pull off and the execution falls short of the promise announced by such ambitions. Peter Pan is a dub-synth mixed bag on which (lead singer) Win Butler's vocal detachment works well on top of a rough production despite the patchwork of influences on which the sound relies and struggles to combine meaningfully - creating a Frankenstein of a song of sorts. The track is followed by Chemistry, a trial of patience that is hard to defend from many - lyrical, vocal, instrumental - standpoints. I will go as far as saying it is my least favorite track I ever heard from Arcade Fire. The album revolves around the concept of media over-saturation and the pursuit of happiness in the digital age. The theme is really central to most of the songs on "Everything Now" and perhaps best exemplified in the lyrics - from the title track: "And every inch of space in your head / Is filled up with the things that you read", "And every film that you've ever seen / Fills the spaces up in your dreams". The concept drives the album off the road to greatness. It's hard to believe a lot of the content was to be taken jokingly, as Butler later asserted, when so much of the lyrical content is as subtle as honking for attention. It's also a shame that the promotional campaign leading to the album took over the internet and ironically saturated people's feed. Sister songs Infinite Content and Infinite_Content are two takes on the same idea - one punk-infused and the other a country ballad - a gimmick that doesn't make up for the troublesome content of the tracks whose greatest feat is conjuring the lyrics "Infinite content / We're infinitely content" and recycling them again, and again, and again. Another not-so-subtle move is the album loop created by first and last tracks (Everything_Now (continued) and Everything Now (continued) ) that perfectly align when listening to the album on a loop, creating the impression of "infinite content". Amongst those songs that rely less on artifice to convey their message, few come full-circle and fulfill the premises of the idea that birthed them. The music feels at times unsure of itself, half-baked in an oven too small to contain the ambition of the album. Signs of Life is an instance of a track that doesn't sit quite right with me, especially on the vocal side (both Win's awkward talk-singing and the combination of vocals). The instrumental is the focal point of the song and its most pleasant feature. Electric Blue feels too repetitive and turns to synth arrangements to carry its power. The ending of the song is the only time where everything comes together for a brief tentative moment with a convergence of its creative undercurrents - a shame that it does so only a couple of seconds before moving on to the next track. The shining beacons of the album are the works that feel the most heartfelt. Everything Now, the album's title track, delivers an exalting sound - too exciting at times, with a choir straddling on the line between creative flair and the overdone - in a successful attempt to impress and overwhelm. The piano motifs and the jingle quality of the melody, along with the energetic cheerful beat remind me of Abba's signature tracks; just as much as Put Your Money On Me. This track builds up a sense of urgency, with an exhilarating synth arrangement, dense lyrics and a pleasant marriage of vocals from Win and Régine. The repetitiveness of the melody does not bother me at all, especially since it's broken by a melodic shift. Pulsing into We Don't Deserve Love, it's easy to look past the laziness of tropes like "I can't see the forest for the trees" when the track has some of the best lyrics on the album. The melody keeps the listener on their toes, slow-burning with atonal synths (again!) that build an eerie atmosphere celebrating the transcendence of human relationships. I choose to have faith in Arcade Fire's upcoming projects; if "Everything Now" is not always deserving of our love, the band's solid record makes me confident that putting my money on them is as safe a move as any!
Favorite lyrics
"Maybe we don't deserve love"
We Don't Deserve Love
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