Arcade Fire’s new album feels like a calculated retrenchment, a heaping pile of everything you want from the band. CraigSJ writes
Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella For years, Arcade Fire has tussled with what it means to be a big deal.
You might mistake this for a story of a band letting the meteoric success of an acclaimed debut indie-rock album go to their heads, but Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, the husband-and-wife couple who sing lead, seemed like indie kids by sheer chance rather than principle or pedigree. In a lengthy 2016 talk with Red Bull Music Academy, Butler explained that Chassagne first discovered what indie rock was while reading the band’s reviews.
WE takes a more refined approach to the mind-set of the previous album. Where Everything Now spoke wryly to the lengths we go to in order to feel fulfilled and entertained, WE ponders the inner turbulence we experience in any time of swift upheaval and how to fight the loneliness that animates the fingers scrolling across the miles and miles of posts the band lampooned in “Infinite Content.” WE isn’t any less melodramatic in its execution, but it is much more personal.
The message is earnest and un-obtuse: We’re wounded, but love is the salve. Life would be great if we could just get over our hang-ups and differences.
On the surface, WE is a return to form, a bookend to the band’s early work in its structure and its subject matter. But like a modern Saturday Night Live sketch, there is a moment when these songs begin to coast on a good idea that’s run its course. The “Lightning” singles do well because they hit hard and get gone. The other songs trend looser and longer, some winningly and others not so much.
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