Arcade Fire
All the time that we wasted
When Arcade Fire won the Grammy for Album of the Year on February 13, 2011, in retrospect, it was one of the last major indie victories. (It was a weird year for the Grammys, with Esperanza Spalding beating out Drake and Justin Bieber for Best New Artist, something I had completely forgotten about until Drake reminded me this year.) In the years of 2008-2011, it felt like indie music could be immensely popular while still being indie, but tastes shifted and indie music slowly became less popular while also less indie. Major labels gobbled up bands with any festival appeal, and a lot of indie bands that I had put a lot of faith in spun their wheels or just flat out started sucking. Arcade Fire went from Merge to Columbia and put out Everything Now.
On their first two albums, Arcade Fire had distinguished themselves from other indie bands with arrangements that really emphasized orchestral textures and colours. The first sounds you hear on their debut album are a chamber orchestra starting up, keyboards imitating snowflakes, and then the Almighty Riff, and the second song on the same album brings in a hurdy-gurdy into a rock album, as big a surprise in indie rock music as it must have felt to hear an accordion on a hip-hop record that same year. Even the National, who also used a lot of strings and horns, didn’t layer them into climaxes the way Arcade Fire did.
I don’t listen to Arcade Fire anymore, having long worn out my digital copies of their first three albums, but a subscriber requested this (PSA: I take requests). There are no original ideas in Arcade Fire’s music—it’s just David Bowie for millennials who don’t want to listen to U2 with no instrumentalist as good as the Edge—which also applies to a lot of critically acclaimed indie music from their era, from Deerhunter to LCD Soundsystem to the National, all bands that started sucking around the same time Arcade Fire did. Arcade Fire’s star plummeted abruptly when they were at their biggest, and any nostalgic interest I might have had left for Arcade Fire evaporated when the serious allegations of Win Butler’s sexual misconduct surfaced.
There was one EP before they became critical darlings, which was promptly reissued immediately after Funeral’s success. Arcade Fire EP is not worth backtracking to, not even to hear Régine Chassagne imitate Björk on “I’m Sleeping in a Submarine” while Win Butler’s vocals wobble around on “Vampire / Forest Fire” like he was trying to channel Neil Young. They’re just testing the waters to see how to pull off dynamic shifts and build-ups (and lyrics about the suburbs), but both the songwriting and production are too rudimentary.
Funeral unintentionally revealed Arcade Fire’s limitations early on, which is that they’re way better with the bombastic songs with big climaxes, and not so good with the slow ballads. “Crown of Love”—the crowd cheers as Butler hunkers down in front of a piano—is clompy with awful lyrics (“I carved your name across my eyelids” is grotesque), and the song is just biding time for its sudden dance climax, a trick that was literally used earlier on “Une année sans lumière” and the following “Wake Up” does something similar too to boot; “Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)” could’ve used a stronger melody. Almost all of the best songs on this album are ones with that big arena sound, and the exceptions are when Régine Chassagne takes lead (“Haiti” and “In the Backseat”). Frankly speaking she should’ve sang far more often on their records: her humble voice provided a contrast to Butler’s increasing un-humble one. Revisiting this album on a recent fall drive, I thrilled to all the parts that they wanted me to thrill to: the mere idea of tunneling from one window of a neighborhood buried in snow to the window of a lover; the punk influence on “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)” that I wish the band used more of; the opening measures of “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”; the ‘lies, lies’ backing vocals on “Rebellion (Lies)”; every time Butler raises his voice. When I watched Arcade Fire live on their Reflektor tour, it seemed like every soul in that stadium belted out the climax of “Wake Up” at the same time, although now it’s a little hard to listen to those anthemic vocals as they’re a relic of 2000s’ alternative.
Neon Bible is darker, with a lot of the bright colours of their debut not so much swapped out as they are buried by portentous organs playing dark chords; the Orwellian lyrics are all political and paranoid (“Men are coming to take me away”; “Shot by a security camera / You can’t watch your own image”). The general vibe of the album is a loss of innocence, with only “No Cars Go,” a re-make of an old tune from their first EP, reminiscent of the childlike wonder and naivety of their early sound (and also uncoincidentally the album’s best song), which is immediately off-set by their most dour song ever to close the album out. The sound is far more American this time around as the Texan-born Win Butler really starts taking over the band’s direction (no more songs like “Haiti” or “Une année sans lumière” from here on out), with songs modeled after the Velvet Underground (“Windowsill”) and Bruce Springsteen (“(Antichrist Television Blues)”). The latter of which is a song about Joe Simpson that makes time to shoehorn a reference to 9/11 in 2007 (“Cause the planes keep crashing always two by two”); the lyrics aren’t as profound as the band would like to think—“Mirror mirror on the wall / Show me where the bombs will fall”—or we thought at the time (the 2000s were an intensely apolitical time in indie rock music), but the music is often set to a pace that the lyrics just snowball along. It’s their most atmospheric album.
The tunes of The Suburbs are memorable, yes, but they’re usually set to basic chord progressions and the percussion never nudges songs in any particular direction (i.e. towards a climax; only “We Used to Wait” actually builds towards a release), so the tunes just clomp towards the end of the song and the next one begins. Consider this the fall, when they over-estimated their talents and put out a 16-track hour-long album when 45 minutes would’ve served them better. Indie music documenting the banality-and-bliss in the suburbs is nothing new—“I see the shapes, I remember from maps”; “Out on my skateboard, the night is just humming”; “Phone turned down, we've nothing much to say”—and as someone who grew up in the suburbs, it was music that I identified very strongly with. And sure enough, the sentiment endeared me back then. “So can you understand / Why I want a daughter while I'm still young?”; “We’re still kids in buses, longing to be free”; “They keep erasing all the streets we grew up in”; “If I could have it back / All the time that we wasted / I’d only waste it again.” Back then. Butler’s lyrics are so earnest that there’s no subtext, which isn’t helped by the fact that he’s also a clumsy poet who thinks everything needs to rhyme in AABB form. “Month of May” should’ve been kept to a 2-minute defibrillator; “Rococo” is weirdly condescending; the fake conversation of “Sprawl I” is corny. But the biggest crime of all is that Regina-led “Sprawl II” mines Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and discovers a potential new sonic territory for them that they barely bother with again. My favourite song here is “Wasted Hours” which feels like a Yo La Tengo song in the lullaby-ish backing vocals, showing a tenderness that was very increasingly rare for this band.
Reflektor is the band’s first outright disappointment, even though it plays like a masterpiece compared to what came after. The album’s few winners—“Reflektor” and “Afterlife” above all—are lost in a sea of filler, rather simplistic musings about technology, pornography, and rock music (“Do you like rock and roll music? Because I don’t know if I do,” Butler says aloud before playing the most overt rock song on the album), and songs stretched out so that the band could have enough material for a double album. “We Exist” coasts on its bass-line for 6 minutes, absolutely unforgivable. The last three songs on the first disc are extremely grim. Whereas classic rock bands used the double album format to experiment different genres that probably wouldn’t have worked in the context of a single, Arcade Fire aren’t eclectic enough to bother besides one cluttered dub experiment (“Flashbulb Eyes”) and a minimal synth song (“Porno”). “We Exist” was written from a gay kid’s perspective (“Daddy it’s true, I’m different from you / But tell me why they treat me like this?”) but that the music video casts Andrew Garfield as a transgender woman highlights the song’s failure: it’s so fucking generic in sentiment that the band themselves mix up sexual orientation with gender identity (or they did it purposefully, hard to tell what’s worse), and even back in 2013, it wasn’t brave to write a song from a minority’s perspective that wasn’t your own, it was just performative. Backed by LCD Soundsystem man James Murphy, the album is also a mismatch between band and producer: Arcade Fire are not a dance band; they’re a rock band with a drummer who can’t play funk so when they do get groovy (“We Exist,” “You Already Know”), they just sound like a rock band.
It would be too easy to say Everything Now was the worst major album of 2017, but it would also be untrue considering Metro Boomin donated full albums of material to Big Sean and Nav, albums which I have heard and confirm are worse. But everyone knows Big Sean and Nav are among the worst rappers to get popular and expect them to put out garbage, whereas no one expected Arcade Fire to bottom out this quickly or thoroughly. Having been criticized for sprawling out on their last two albums, they go the opposite route and make a short 47-minute album but half of it feels like filler, including the centerpiece two-parter where Win Butler goes “Infinite content…infinitely content,” making you yearn for the well-intentioned musings about love in the technology age just four years earlier because they’ve traded sincerity for irony. Everyone has an irony phase, but Butler is in his late-30s by this point, and he had built success as a lyricist that wasn’t. “Peter Pan” and “Chemistry” are stinkers; “Put Your Money on Me” has a synth-line that had me running back to Jesse Lanza’s “Giddy”; the title track is no substitute for ABBA. Tapping Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangaltier as a producer would’ve made sense, again, if Arcade Fire had any sense of groove to them. Portishead’s Geoff Barrow lends a hand to “Creature Comfort,” a song where they detail someone who decides not to kill themselves because, ostensibly, they put on Funeral to listen to. Alternative dance made sense in the late-80s/early-90s where bands wanted to appeal to both electronic and rock audiences. Arcade Fire are not New Order, and regardless that they’re better than Primal Scream (though it must be stated the Primal Scream had the better album of 2013), they’re hopelessly out of time on this record. But not only that, they’re also detached from reality by trying to make alternative dance pretentious instead of getting people onto the dancefloor.
We brings in Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich to bring them out of their dance phase and back towards their origins; two-parter “The Lightning”—four pairs of these 10 songs are two-parters as if they were a prog band—dates back to Funeral, but it also plays like an ersatz “Wake Up.” Twenty years ago, Win Butler sang like he was trying to rouse an entire sleepy generation; here, the lyrics—which includes them going “New phone, who dis?” on “Age of Anxiety II”—are too vague to be affecting. “The Lightning” is supposed to be inspired by immigrant refugees trying to get into the U.S. according to Butler, but the song itself offers no clues about any of that, just Bono-levels of egotism about nothing at all (“I wonder why, am I the only one? […] Jesus Christ was an only son”; “I was trying to run away, but a voice told me to stay / And put the feeling in a song”). Peter Gabriel—the greatest singer of the 70s reduced to a sad rasp—comes along for the ride on yet another vague song about how it doesn’t matter what race or religion everyone is that elicits a ‘gee, thanks’ from me. The album is better than Everything Now by default, yes, but it’s also a feeble nostalgia product that’s far less interesting to me than an abysmal failure of an album, and it’s also more proof that Godrich can’t help anyone not named Radiohead: he’s a good but extremely limited producer.
Canadian indie from the naughts were defined for me by three bands, one from each of the biggest province by population: Arcade Fire from Quebec, Broken Social Scene from Ontario, and the New Pornographers from British Columbia, and though each had different approaches to rock music, I liken them to one another for their mix of male-female voices, but mostly male. Broken Social Scene’s breakthrough album You Forgot It In People is one of the few indie albums from that era that has aged well because of its washed out aesthetic (akin to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot); many nights wandering around to the gentle insect buzz of “I’m Still Your Fag.” More than the Arcade Fire albums, Broken Social Scene sounds like a real Canadian—specifically Torontonian, sure—diorama in the variety of sounds, from microhouse to post-rock instrumentals between indie rock songs that were highlights but also few and far between for a beloved indie rock album; to wit, the most-popular song on that album contains the word “Anthem” in it but the vocals are a soft, looped whisper. Alas, their albums afterwards went for more direct but also tremendously boring hooks and actual-anthems, and like Arcade Fire, front-man Kevin Drew sang more and more even though he had nothing to say (his debut solo album has a song lamenting how some girls are simply too beautiful to fuck); they went from musical collective to sounding like just another indie band. I watched them on a lawn for their Hug of Thunder tour and it must have been the most lifeless concert I’ve ever attended.
The New Pornographers have never pretended to be interested in anything more than a good tune (they’re a power pop band, so it comes with the territory), so you would think that they’re the least interesting of the three. True, but I’d also say they were the best regardless. A.C. Newman’s lyrics might generally lack substance, but he also doesn’t have the holier-than-thou irony that Butler picked up along the way, and doesn’t have the ick factor of Kevin Drew; you can’t picture Newman doing an ode to masturbation despite their weird band name. Plus, he shares vocals with Neko Case and Dan Bejar (later of Destroyer fame), both more interesting vocalists and songwriters than the other voices of Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene (I’d estimate that 75% of the band’s best songs are actually sung by Case and Bejar). Though they never really experimented outside of power pop—Whiteout Conditions was supposedly inspired by krautrock but I, a great lover of krautrock, can’t hear it at all—they never gave up their love for tuneage, and 2014’s Brill Bruisers and 2017’s Whiteout Conditions are some in the shortlist for best rock albums of their respective years, sounding the same without being nostalgic, with a quality that was well beyond the reach of their contemporaries by that point.
I used to hum the lines “If I could have it back, all the time that we wasted / I’d only waste it again” to myself randomly, a touching sentiment that could be liberally applied to basically anything: failed relationships all the way to useless degrees. With regards to Arcade Fire, I wasted a lot of time listening to them and so many other indie bands from that era but now, I look back on a lot of those records and wonder what exactly they stood for.
Arcade Fire EP - B- Funeral - A- Neon Bible - A- The Suburbs - B Reflektor - C+ Everything Now - F We - D