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Arcade Fire have something to say ; about the oppressive mire of our digital age where content incessantly talks and the fantastical notion of real connection walks. “Every song I have ever heard is playing at the same time and it’s absurd” bemoans Win Butler. For a band that bloomed in the later half of the 2000s, amidst the emergence of a new music streaming reality, Butler and his Montreal collective have rooted themselves deeply within their own subversive universe of detached ennui. Yet from the the purple neon title of Everything Now’s cover, and its depiction of a yet explored horizon, something else is being conveyed.

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What that is, sounds like – “we are all going the hell so we might as well dance” – because what Arcade Fire have put out for their fifth album is on first experience their most accessible album to date but upon deeper inspection raises more questions than was probably intended.

Bringing on board as producer Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter should have hinted that there could be elements of dance-indie-pop but when second track Signs Of Life struts in with all its glory, it’s astonishing how disco driven this and many of the songs are. Creature Comfort whose intro sounds like the loading screen of an Atari game, will be the song you’ll be dancing to at your next summer festival as you plea along with Butler  for “God make me famous, if you can’t – just make it painless”. And whilst their marketing team might have tried to preemptively control the dialogue of Everything Now by releasing a mock review that called out its similarity to sounding like LCD Soundsystem, well there is no doubt of that in the first half of the album.

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It’s hookier than an hangnail going through the sleeve of a cashmere sweater and one suspects that’s the intention; lulling the listener with Butler’s repetitive intonations which are obscured behind the veil of billowy arrangements of distorted rhythms, hand claps, and droll flutes and horns. Prime examples come in with Peter Pan and Chemistry sounding like someone within the group just fulfilled their homage to The Specials and 2 tone.

Infinite Content followed by Infinite_Content provides the middle break and a shift towards an Arcade Fire we are more familiar with, however the glitter ball still turns with Electric Blue and Regine Chassagne’s falsetto letting us know, backed by chunky synthesisers, that she can’t get her head around it, “I thought I found it, but I found out I don’t know shit”. Well I’m too starting to relate at this point. By the time the album gets to the lightly produced We Don’t Deserve Love it feels like the sun is finally peaking over the horizon signalling the end of this frenetic experience.

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Arcade Fire are not about huge statements and commentary, which is why Everything Now gets itself tangled up. The group’s talent had always come from producing music that comes from within. It’s quiet rumination and its impact comes not from a satirical marketing campaign, or the accepted razzle-dazzle mania of imminent oblivion but the emotional devastation of songs deliver without pretense. For example, Cold Wind with its building intensity and revelatory end was the Arcade Fire song that made me a fan, it’s over fifteen years old but it’s one I’ve never forgotten. Conversely after the sumptuous synths and funk aspirations fall away by the bookended Everything Now, I’m not sure the same could be said for this album.

3.5 stars

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AMNPLIFY – DB