Review Summary: The fall of indie rock giants
Oh, Arcade Fire, there are very few bands in today's age that can proudly claim they truly made a modern classic. Arcade Fire managed to make one with their debut record Funeral. Combining rich passionate instrumentation and well written personal lyrics dealing mainly with death, you would have a hard time finding an album that has appeared on so many "best of 00's" lists. Their following two albums didn't match the brilliance of their debut, but were still fantastic in their own different way.
After winning a Grammy award for the album of the year in 2011 it seemed like they were ready to become the biggest band in the world. But their next record Reflektor produced with LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, which resulted in a more dance rock and less chamber pop direction, was the breaking point. While the album contained some of their best songs to date, it was an overlong bloated record that would benefit greatly from being released on a single disc. The album also marked a departure of the violinist Sarah Neufeld, who would only remain a touring member.
So it was interesting to see where the band would head next after 4 years. The first new song after that period we got was "I Give you Power", an incredibly vapid and lifeless attempt at a political song and the worst track that the band has yet produced. Luckily it didn't make it into the album.
The four singles preceding the album were not exactly great either. The first one, the title track, is actually a fairly decent pop song despite borrowing a bit too much from ABBA and its extremely repetitive chorus.
"Creature Comfort" is a solid song melodically, but any merit this track might have had is ruined by some of the worst lyrics the band has ever written, such as "Some boys hate themselves, spend their lives resenting their fathers" and "Assisted suicide, she dreams about dying all the time". It doesn't help that Regine's screeching vocals in this track are unbearable, which is odd because normally her backing vocals sound much better. The next two singles "Signs of Life" and "Electric Blue" are dull and forgettable attempts at alternative dance.
It says quite something when The Killers made a better disco single than Arcade Fire in 2017.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album gets even worse, the streak from dull "Peter Pan" to "Infinite_Content" contains some of the most embarrassing music the band has ever produced. Especially "Chemistry", a laughable attempt at a love song with another annoyingly repetitive chorus is just awful.
But the album almost manages to redeem itself with its last two proper tracks "Put Your Money on Me" and "We Don't Deserve Love". despite being slightly overlong, those songs are backed up by fairly memorable and not annoying melodies and tolerable lyrics.
The lyrics are a quite big issue here. Every album the band has made before had some overarching theme. On Funeral it was death, on Neon Bible it was religion, on The Suburbs it was growing up and on Refletkor it was love.
Everything Now is mainly a conceptually bland attempt at consumerism critique. And it is executed without any subtlety and in a very pretentious way. Then we got some extremely sloppy lyrics that only angsty high schooler would find amusing:
"Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, sometimes Sunday, Love is hard, sex is easy, God in Heaven, could you please me?"
"Go to the city, go to the store, ask for a loan from another bank"
"Infinite content, infinite content, we're infinitely content"
"Maybe there's a good God, damn"
Did Win seriously think these lines were clever in any way?
Vocals seem to suffer as well, Win Butler's vocal performance sounds much more phoned in and less sincere, the instrumentation is also very bland, all the rich string and horn arrangements from their previous albums are gone and replaced by synths.
Overall, Everything Now is a very disappointing album that is mostly either forgettable or annoying with preachy lyricism. The fact that the worst songs on Reflektor are better than every single track here is just frustrating.
Arcade Fire find themselves in a situation where many big rock bands have been before, it is clear that fame got into their head and they are on inevitable decline. Coldplay devolved into making vapid pop music, Muse have turned into pompous conspiracy numbnuts, U2 were led by a frontman with Messiah complex and Oasis were too drugged to care. In the case of Arcade Fire, the band has lost everything that made them appealing in the first place, they are desperately trying to tell people something, but they actually have nothing interesting to say.
