The Arcade Fire
“Neon Bible”
Merge Records
Let’s start with the things that “Neon Bible” is not: a world-beating career album; an intensely personal look inward; dramatic without a “melo” preface. In short, it’s not “Funeral,” the Arcade Fire’s 2004 debut.
Instead, “Neon Bible,” the second album from the Montreal group that took rock music by storm three years ago, finds the band both scaling back and expanding its scope. While “Funeral,” finished in the wake of several deaths in the band’s families, successfully turned individual anguish into collectively felt rock songs, “Neon Bible” looks to the outside world for lyrical cues, taking on religion, war and commercialism. The band has also added to its sound, anchoring several songs with a massive pipe organ.
But at a songwriting level, the Arcade Fire has pared things down considerably. Bruce Springsteen seems to have replaced Joy Division as the indie influence du jour, and his influence bosses around songs such as “Keep the Car Running” and “(Antichrist Television Blues).” These are tracks built on simple repetitive chord changes and easy riffs ““ less talk, more rock. Despite the ostensible grandeur of the band’s string arrangements and the look-at-me organ, the songs’ sleeker nature works in their favor.
Aside from a few stinkers (notably, the first and last tracks), the songs are driving and memorable. “No Cars Go,” a pre-“Funeral” track that gets reworked here, is one of the highlights ““ an anthem among anthems that juxtaposes desperately brittle guitar lines against a triumphant horn section.
It’s the band’s nonmusical ambitions that hurt the album. While “Funeral” excelled at capturing inner turmoil, trying to grasp the world stage is too much for even an overly dramatic band.
The Arcade Fire certainly isn’t short on bombast, but not every band can be U2. The lyrics are terrible throughout, frantically pointing at phantoms without giving them any substance: “Black Mirror” finds singer Win Butler asking, “Mirror mirror on the wall / show me where their bombs will fall.”
“Black Wave / Bad Vibrations,” two songs sandwiched together, almost has a surreal vibe ruined by Butler singing “Stop now before it’s too late / Eating in the ghetto on a hundred-dollar plate.”
His next line, “There’s a great black wave in the middle of the sea” is much more haunting, and it’s a shame that more of the material doesn’t follow in that vein.
The Arcade Fire, along with the Shins, is one of several bands that have recently broken through indie rock’s glass ceiling and found themselves tentatively embraced by the mainstream.
“Neon Bible” will probably outsell “Funeral,” and deservedly so: It’s a concise, anthem-filled album with more than a few tracks that should find homes on KROQ and maybe even MTV.
But the songs, while perhaps more immediately enjoyable than those of the debut, lose some of the band’s weird wonder as their subject matter gets more emptily universal.
We’re left with what “Neon Bible” ultimately is: merely a very good album. Not a disappointment, but not quite a roaring success.
E-mail Greenwald at dgreenwald@media.ucla.edu and Puri at kpuri@media.ucla.edu.