REVIEW: Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
This album is actually quite good, in a sense. If you take away the songwriting, lyrics, and vocals, it is excellent. There is some superb instrumentation here, often immense, thick with strings and guitars, full of muscle and venom that fit the mood of the lyrics, but not necessarily the content. "Intervention"'s pulsing organ and instrumentation are a wake-up call of sorts, and an excellent device to fit with the religious mentality and theme of the song, even if the rest of the pieces don't quite fit. The sound is huge for the most part, drawing the listener in with its orchestral mentality excellently entwined with its indie rock roots; at the same time, sparsely strewn throughout the record are small, timid gems like the title track, made of a few strings and a ukelele, that recall Simon & Garfunkel and George Harrison at their best, and will fit well in a commercial for a Toyota sedan in a few years. Here are tracks that folk purists will find recognizable intermixed with the over-the-top production numbers that bring to mind pictures of a record producer yelling, Spector-like, "More strings! More! Yes, yes, more!" Depending on your mentality, either one interrupts the flow of the other, or both fit well in the swing of the album.
And the album is well-constructed. Our music-listening culture has become a culture of the single-track and the Shuffle button, but a few groups still know how to make excellently structured records. The Arcade Fire is one of them. The album starts out huge with "Black Mirror" and "Keep the Car Running," then fades back and catches its breath with the quiet of "Neon Bible" before being shocked out of that torpor with the first organ notes of "Intervention." The middle of the record features a pulsing-yet-slow mariachi-inspired "Ocean of Noise," which could very well be the end of side one, before it all starts over again on side 2 with "The Well and the Lighthouse" and less folky, more straight-indie inspired pieces that follow (including the self-cover "No Cars Go," easily the most limited of all the tracks, and the only one that really sounds out-of-place, no matter how they try to bring it up to speed, in sound, in theme, in everything), finally wrapping it up with the slow, emotion-filled "My Body is a Cage," which borders on Soul in sound, yet still possesses that huge organ that gives it backbone and teeth and makes it its own track, and by far the best on the record.
These songs all sound spectacular - on first listen. But the overindulged production has its limitations - the vocals are all but quashed beneath the sheer scale of the sound, which is a shame, because they have a piercing, weeping quality that fits in so well with the rest of the sound of the album. But you can't hear them half the time, and when you can, they echo horribly (and probably purposefully) and distract from the rest of the music, especially on "Neon Bible." Here, the attempt to recreate the 80s production mentality has failed miserably, in part because it is a reproduction and in part because 80s production was terrible to begin with.
Beneath the music, beneath the sound, beneath the themes are lyrics. And they are by far the album's biggest limitation. They, at many times, border on poignant, but can never quite make the leap, and end up insipidly, awfully trite, often conceited, and ever dull, offering up such pearls of wisdom as "shadows, they fear the sun" and "Even the noise you make when you sleep / Can't swim across a river so deep" which means absolutely nothing. The rhyme sceme and meter are all repetitive, and "Intervention," which *sounds* so spectacular and moving in its rich depth, becomes as thin as paper when it comes to lyricism: "Working for the Church while your family dies / You take what they give you and you keep it inside"; it becomes a pseudo-intellectual crock about the corruption of religion, a theme rife with possibility, yet nonetheless a failure on the record: "We can't find you now / But they're gonna get the money back somehow". How deep.
The only track that really fulfills its lyrical potential is "My Body Is A Cage." Where the other lyrics on the record fall into pseudo-gothic obscurity (And what's with the French? Is it supposed to be mysterious? It's lame), "My Body Is A Cage" is poignant, beautiful, and tragic, an account of life with a disability (or just lousy dance moves). "We take what we're given / Just because you've forgotten / That don't mean you're forgiven". Now just replace "don't" with "doesn't" and you've got a hell of a lyric.
There is an exceptional album in here somewhere, hidden behind overproduction and third-rate lyricisms. It all depends on what you're willing to hear, and whether you're going to let your misguidings about the nuances drive your opinion. If anything, it's a great record to play in the background while you're doing other things, or when you're in a particular mood and able to look past its shortcomings to just be enveloped in its sound. On a whole, it doesn't quite deserve the praise that's heaped on it so readily, but parts of it do, and on many tracks, that's all that is necessary.
B-
This album is actually quite good, in a sense. If you take away the songwriting, lyrics, and vocals, it is excellent. There is some superb instrumentation here, often immense, thick with strings and guitars, full of muscle and venom that fit the mood of the lyrics, but not necessarily the content. "Intervention"'s pulsing organ and instrumentation are a wake-up call of sorts, and an excellent device to fit with the religious mentality and theme of the song, even if the rest of the pieces don't quite fit. The sound is huge for the most part, drawing the listener in with its orchestral mentality excellently entwined with its indie rock roots; at the same time, sparsely strewn throughout the record are small, timid gems like the title track, made of a few strings and a ukelele, that recall Simon & Garfunkel and George Harrison at their best, and will fit well in a commercial for a Toyota sedan in a few years. Here are tracks that folk purists will find recognizable intermixed with the over-the-top production numbers that bring to mind pictures of a record producer yelling, Spector-like, "More strings! More! Yes, yes, more!" Depending on your mentality, either one interrupts the flow of the other, or both fit well in the swing of the album.
And the album is well-constructed. Our music-listening culture has become a culture of the single-track and the Shuffle button, but a few groups still know how to make excellently structured records. The Arcade Fire is one of them. The album starts out huge with "Black Mirror" and "Keep the Car Running," then fades back and catches its breath with the quiet of "Neon Bible" before being shocked out of that torpor with the first organ notes of "Intervention." The middle of the record features a pulsing-yet-slow mariachi-inspired "Ocean of Noise," which could very well be the end of side one, before it all starts over again on side 2 with "The Well and the Lighthouse" and less folky, more straight-indie inspired pieces that follow (including the self-cover "No Cars Go," easily the most limited of all the tracks, and the only one that really sounds out-of-place, no matter how they try to bring it up to speed, in sound, in theme, in everything), finally wrapping it up with the slow, emotion-filled "My Body is a Cage," which borders on Soul in sound, yet still possesses that huge organ that gives it backbone and teeth and makes it its own track, and by far the best on the record.
These songs all sound spectacular - on first listen. But the overindulged production has its limitations - the vocals are all but quashed beneath the sheer scale of the sound, which is a shame, because they have a piercing, weeping quality that fits in so well with the rest of the sound of the album. But you can't hear them half the time, and when you can, they echo horribly (and probably purposefully) and distract from the rest of the music, especially on "Neon Bible." Here, the attempt to recreate the 80s production mentality has failed miserably, in part because it is a reproduction and in part because 80s production was terrible to begin with.
Beneath the music, beneath the sound, beneath the themes are lyrics. And they are by far the album's biggest limitation. They, at many times, border on poignant, but can never quite make the leap, and end up insipidly, awfully trite, often conceited, and ever dull, offering up such pearls of wisdom as "shadows, they fear the sun" and "Even the noise you make when you sleep / Can't swim across a river so deep" which means absolutely nothing. The rhyme sceme and meter are all repetitive, and "Intervention," which *sounds* so spectacular and moving in its rich depth, becomes as thin as paper when it comes to lyricism: "Working for the Church while your family dies / You take what they give you and you keep it inside"; it becomes a pseudo-intellectual crock about the corruption of religion, a theme rife with possibility, yet nonetheless a failure on the record: "We can't find you now / But they're gonna get the money back somehow". How deep.
The only track that really fulfills its lyrical potential is "My Body Is A Cage." Where the other lyrics on the record fall into pseudo-gothic obscurity (And what's with the French? Is it supposed to be mysterious? It's lame), "My Body Is A Cage" is poignant, beautiful, and tragic, an account of life with a disability (or just lousy dance moves). "We take what we're given / Just because you've forgotten / That don't mean you're forgiven". Now just replace "don't" with "doesn't" and you've got a hell of a lyric.
There is an exceptional album in here somewhere, hidden behind overproduction and third-rate lyricisms. It all depends on what you're willing to hear, and whether you're going to let your misguidings about the nuances drive your opinion. If anything, it's a great record to play in the background while you're doing other things, or when you're in a particular mood and able to look past its shortcomings to just be enveloped in its sound. On a whole, it doesn't quite deserve the praise that's heaped on it so readily, but parts of it do, and on many tracks, that's all that is necessary.
B-
VIEW 12 of 12 COMMENTS
riva:
It's supposed to be at least somewhat disturbing; all the cool kids are doing Halloween profile pics. 
riva:
Yeah, I figured you didn't dress like Hunter S. Thompson all the time. Although, that might be fun, too. 