ARCADE Fire’s fifth album contains a song called Chemistry. It sounds a bit like Wham! Its approach to rhyming makes you fear frontman Win Butler is suddenly going to yelp “A-B-C, easy as 1-2-3”. And in 217 seconds, it illustrates how slight and throwaway a mighty band have – at least temporarily – become.
Ahead of Everything Now’s release, the Canadians produced a parody marketing campaign and e-commerce platform, including their own fake review. The aim was to emphasise the album’s themes of rampant media consumerism, obsession with immediacy, and thirst for soulless technology. Now, it comes across as a shield for their music.
Everything Now is the first Arcade Fire album with no genuine insight: a pick-a-topic, semi-concept album that simply tells us what we already know and either try to do something about or choose to accept.
"How slight and throwaway a mighty band have – at least temporarily – become," says reviewer Mark Stead
It has its moments. The title track showcases the contribution of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, with its Seventies' dancefloor groove and crashing ABBA-style piano riff. Electric Blue is a captivating electro-swirl where Régine Chassagne’s dreamy vocals lend a welcome counterpoint to the ultra-cynicism elsewhere. And We Don’t Deserve Love is the one track where Arcade Fire combine the sweep and candour that was once ever-present in their work.
But the quality of these songs is both magnified and downsized by the mediocrity surrounding them. Signs Of Life, where Butler virtually and unconvincingly raps in the style of Blondie’s Rapture, Peter Pan and Good God Damn – semi-ironic sleaze-rock that’s as bad as its title – make you question whether you’re really listening to an Arcade Fire album. Creature Comfort, with its OMD-style wall of synth, strives to be big music, but its overexcited, look-at-me vocals don’t relate a big idea.
It’s not that the album crumples under the weight of expectation, disappointing purely through comparison with earlier, better work. It’s confused, flimsy and ordinary when judged solely on its own merits. On Everything Now Arcade Fire sound like they’ve never sounded before. It isn’t a compliment. Because they just sound bored.
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