Photo courtesy Arcade Fire/Facebook
Arcade Fire is dancing. Arcade Fire has on its shoulders a big shiny head that looks like Arcade Fire’s own head, but huge and crinkled. Arcade Fire is playing a song that sounds like Arcade Fire’s own song, but fatter and clumsier. It looks like dancing, but it is social work. It looks like dancing, but it is guilt. It looks like praying, but it is a lecture about praying. It looks like fun, but it is not fun. Arcade Fire says it is fun, because Arcade Fire is dancing.
I often feel logy before putting on a record that I’m slated to review, like I’m getting up in the morning for work. But that dissipates. The music soon becomes a pool cue that gets mental billiards rolling, points clacking against counterpoints. I get hooked, as by a game or by the rush of conversation. Five listens into Arcade Fire’s Reflektor, I still feel like I’m commuting and the train is late. It’s not because the songs are long, although the songs are long. It’s that the band sounds like they are working, adding up data, taking meetings. Dancing on the clock. Not like they’re playing. It makes me feel bad for them. Sorry you have a hard job, Arcade Fire.
I am not trying to be sarcastic about Arcade Fire. They do have a hard job. By inclination, as well as by structural position as the cult band that became massive (Best Album Grammy, sold-out arena shows, Internet-straining album leaks), Arcade Fire radiates earnestness, and the fallout of earnestness is sarcasm. But I respect and believe in Arcade Fire’s sincerity, intelligence, ambition, conscientiousness, skill. The loss this week of Lou Reed was an apt reminder that perversely inspired willfulness and not-a-shit-giving can trump such commendable virtues. But not always. Arcade Fire’s high-water marks on record and in concert are fine arguments for the humanist band (Beatles, Springsteen, Clash, Outkast) even though their most-mentioned heroes hit their peaks as anti-humanists, such as David Bowie (who guests here), New Order, and Talking Heads (who haunt here).
Using sophisticated recording technology to criticize technology is modern rock’s most exhausted routine.
The benefit of anti-humanism is that it sets an artist apart in splendid isolation. The benefit of humanism is connection—a value Arcade Fire always has enacted, with its large ensemble singing chorally in procession through a crowd. But the risk in that linkage is that as the artist gains status the exchange becomes uneven, shifts from symbiosis to control. The artist becomes the educator, the evangelist. When Bruce Springsteen sings Woody Guthrie he is not demonstrating against the state but demonstrating something to his audience, teaching a lesson. This may be the way Arcade Fire is dancing.
What they have made instead is almost the record I was hoping to hear, but there is nothing more frustrating than a near miss. I’d hoped Reflektor would carry on directly from the about-face at the end of The Suburbs, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” a sparkling recapitulation of the band’s bedroom-transcendentalist mythos as utopian disco, with lead vocals by Régine Chassagne.
I was encouraged by “Reflektor,” the first single—it has the beat, albeit a draggy version that never spirals into Giorgio Moroder stratospherics. I figured there’d be more where it came from. Ideally with Chassagne fronting again, because “Reflektor” makes a solid case that Win Butler can’t step lightly enough to sing disco.
It turns out there’s not a lot more like “Sprawl II” here, though. Chassagne still doesn’t sing enough. The band is a bit defensive about having brought in the party scientist James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) as a co-producer, saying he didn’t really change the record much. I wish he’d done more. No question, there are beats aplenty, like the badly overdone dub-reggae of “Flashbulb Eyes,” and the not-so-bad diluted chic pulse of “Afterlife” near the end. There’s “Here Comes the Night Time,” its take on Caribbean carnival rhythms held to midtempo (and Van Morrison-like) which gives the band time to dig in and find geography, geometry, and chronometry in it—that is, momentum.
But the only track that slakes my original craving is the 10th one, “It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus),” in which synthesized and electric basses tongue-kiss and Chassagne and Butler wind their voices together like ivy. When rhythm comes alive it’s always both direct experience and metaphor—here, a metaphor for the patience required to outwit and outlive a crisis, as well as a metaphor for the ongoing crisis of life itself. Like metaphor, true dancing is doubling. Compounding. Counterforce and contretemps.
Much of the rest of the time, the crisis that seems like it will never end is the record itself. This hour-plus of music gets stagnant as songs bog down in flourishes and effects, as if to compensate for the punch the rhythm section can’t quite land.
There are some excellent guitar solos, but excellent guitar solos are kind of the kryptonite of dancing.
Lyrically Reflektor seems to get tangled in side issues that stand in for more substantial ones. I will spare you my rant about the immature condescension of “Normal Person,” which is also my rant about the immature condescension of “Modern Man” on The Suburbs. I will spare you my rant about the “k” in “Reflektor.” I am still deciding whether to spare you my rant about the Orpheus and Eurydice references; let’s just say it’s usually a sign of trouble when rockers turn to stock classical allusions.
These are significant problems because this is Arcade Fire, the great humanist band of the decade, the one that said a rock group could be like a neighborhood, a town, a family, and that by extension your family, your friends, your town could be like a rock band. I get that they can’t stick with that formula forever. But if what they resort to instead is trite symbolism, to spoonfuls of science fiction, the bedroom transcendentalists leave themselves without any linoleum or tile flooring to rise above. As Marianne Moore might say, their imaginary gardens have no real toads in them. As Lou Reed might say, they tell you they’re waiting on the street with money in their hands, but they don’t say which intersection and how much money.
Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2013/11/arcade_fire_s_reflektor_reviewed.html
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