Album Review: Arcade Fire - Everything Now

Arcade Fire have carved a singular space in contemporary pop, as arena-filling contrarians. The grumpy factor is ratcheted all the way up to 11 on their fifth studio album, a diatribe about corporate cynicism that interweaves anxious rhythms, shiny melodies, and student-debate-society levels of political engagement.

An anti-business whinge fest from an outfit freshly signed to Sony should be a tough sell. But Arcade Fire sweeten the sermonising with a keenly-rendered mash-up of 1970s classic rock and nerve-shredding alt.pop. The ghost of Talking Heads looms especially large, with ‘Electric Blue’ recalling the shuffling ennui of ‘This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)’, and ‘Put Your Money On Me’ swaying to a groove reminiscent of ‘Once In A Lifetime’.

Not every departure is as successful. ‘Chemistry’ takes a nightmarish detour into free-wheeling funk, and ‘Infinite Content’ — it might as well be called “the internet is the worst idea ever” — is a rant in search of a tune. It’s an unfortunate reminder, moreover, of frontman Win Butler’s messianic tendencies as a lyricist — an instinct that ill-serves the Canadian-American ensemble’s passionately unmoored music.

The title track has already divided opinion, with many recoiling from what they regard as a poorly executed hipster tilt at Abba, which is to ignore Abba’s importance as one of the first group’s to explicitly explore the tension between upbeat melody and downbeat wordplay.

Yet the band revert to moody indie royalty type on ‘Creature Comfort’, a full-throttle dirge which winningly juxtaposes Butler’s Springsteen yelp and backing singer (and Butler’s wife) Regine Chassagne’s pixie sigh. It confirms Arcade Fire are at their best when they give up attempting to fix a formula not broken in the first place and, instead, embrace the gaudy stadium rockers within.

Ed Power