Arcade Fire became a new band for their 2013 album Reflektor, a prismatic, 75-minute carnival of genres about creating meaningful connections in a diffuse technological age. Before the album came out, they billed themselves as the Reflektors, with a fake website, a fake album, a bunch of secret shows, and some top-heavy papier-mâché masks. As this new band, they were reborn on the dance floor. No longer just po-faced helmet bangers and nostalgia merchants using Google Maps to make people cry, now they had synths and beats and a silver sparkle with James Murphy and Haitian kompa and rara music all celebrating with joie de vivre under the mirror ball.
Who Arcade Fire became on their new album Everything Now—a tangled, joyless record of Banksy disco and bloodless new wave that examines fear, love, and suicide in our modern media landscape—is anyone’s guess. Before its release, they created a fake “global media and e-commerce platform” called Everything Now, a brand play that spawned Creature Comfort cereal, engaged with KFC’s Twitter account, and published “fake news” websites, one of which was a satirical review of the record in question. The aim of their online theatre, apparently, was to bolster some of the record’s themes of infinite consumerism in media, the overwhelming anxiety of the moment, the recursive loop of technology—sex, drugs, and Marshall McLuhan.
It would be one thing if the tiresome rollout ran contrary to its music—a bit of cosmic brain Twitter irony to temper another earnest Arcade Fire album. But Everything Now attempts to capture life within and without the content loop—the paranoia, narcissism, and “creature comforts” within; the love and fear without. It’s a worthy undertaking because this kind of acute despair feels more pervasive than ever. Things have changed since OK Computer asked and answered a lot of these questions. Now it’s not a dread that looms large, it’s a pronounced daily trauma, one self-inflicted by simply logging on and making yourself available as a marketing target.
But on Everything Now, Arcade Fire aren’t lifeboats for our ennui, they’re scolds. Their self-reflexive mood and half-baked critiques have landed all over the record’s grooves. The “society, man” songs are riddled with cliche, and the love songs are a bore. If ever you faulted Arcade Fire for their unmoored passion, their art-school busking aesthetic, their words lousy with import and meaning, you have to admit at least they sounded like they gave a shit. The charmless air of Everything Now captured by Arcade Fire’s six-person lineup—with the aid of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, Beak>’s Geoff Barrow, and Pulp bassist Steve Mackey, among others—creates an atmosphere of self-loathing and dim romance, housing two separate songs whose lyrics are “Infinite content/Infinite content/We’re infinitely content.” For a band who discovered themselves in sincerity, they are thoroughly lost when they bet it all on cynicism.
Never mind that Win Butler—who once burst forth from the mix to holler from his heart, singing hallelujah—now just intones his words in this dry, accusatory tone. Never mind that he asks you if you “want to get messed up,” preaches at the pulpit about boys and girls who hate themselves, and then just raps all seven days of the week at one point. Never mind that the record falls off a cliff with the painful dub-synth disaster “Peter Pan,” a song so starchy and grooveless it seems impossible they could write anything worse. Never mind that they do write something worse with “Chemistry,” the sound of Billy Squier pouring warm milk over the concept of reggae.
These are all just bad omens on the way to realizing Everything Now is trapped in lyrical and musical stasis. Conceptually, the songs don’t transcend their social critique, they succumb to it. Musically, they don’t have momentum, they simply fight inertia. The warmer back half of the record is at war with itself, trying to pull real feelings up from arrangements that are topographically dull and looped out much longer than they need to be. “Put Your Money on Me” pulls off a neat melodic shift halfway through (cribbed from the chorus of “Dancing Queen”) but then runs out of ideas, relying instead on a tired synth bassline. It’s whiplash to go from the scrappy, orchestrated new wave-pop of “We Exist” to something this anemic, as if the only lesson they took from dance music is that songs should, above all, alternate between two chords.
Arcade Fire used to be goobers whose bombast and sanctimony were forgiven because their music was so dazzling. They made a simple blues progression seem like an ocean on “Keep the Car Running.” And live, I mean, to watch Richard Reed Parry go to war with a concert bass drum, or to watch Régine Chassagne stare transfixed as she sings of Haiti or to watch the entire band rev up a dance pit with “Here Comes the Night Time” is to see why they became iconoclasts 13 years ago, simply by giving so much space to people who didn’t care about being cool. Like U2 and Bruce Springsteen before them, Arcade Fire songs aren’t measured by their length or chart placement, they’re measured by their area, and how many people they gather to emote within it.
But here in the claustrophobic space of Everything Now, the warts of Arcade Fire are impossible to miss. Map the vocal melody on “No Cars Go” or “Sprawl II” with your finger in the air and you’ll arc it up and down in peaks and valleys. Do the same thing with the turgid and thoughtless “Creature Comfort” or “Peter Pan” or “Signs of Life” and your finger will barely move. Butler’s commitment to the detached frontman where singing occurs barely or not at all robs songs of their emotional largesse, that basic thing we licensed to Arcade Fire and upon which their entire identity relies.
What saving grace there is on Everything Now is scattered throughout its mercifully short 47 minutes. The title track, one last reverie before the darkness, shines much like its counterpart on Reflektor. Those unison strings and piano, that four-on-the-floor beat, the exalting choir behind the band, Patrick Bebey’s pygmy flute performance: it’s a treasure. Sure, the chorus is Win Butler getting wistful and bitter about how he, too, is allowed everything all of the time, but it’s upheld by the life of the music around it. Butler manages to fight through all his doubt on the touching finale “We Don’t Deserve Love,” a woozy, protracted sunrise, a full-band capitulation to feeling at end of a bleak, anti-celebratory album. These and the filigrees of Chassagne’s voice on the standout “Electric Blue”—specifically when it helixes up into the stratosphere near the end—are to be clung to and cherished as deeply human moments on a record desperately in need of them.
Which is to say that Everything Now succeeds in concept alone: It is an album about a once and possibly future great band trapped in its own feedback loop (the digital download is indeed sequenced for infinite content: the final track “Everything Now (Continued)” connects seamlessly with the intro “Everything_Now (Continued)”). But it belies to such a great degree what we’ve come to love about Arcade Fire in the first place. On “Creature Comfort,” Butler sings about someone attempting suicide while listening to Funeral. In the world of Everything Now, it works as this shocking, bemused moment of interconnectivity. The way he sings it—almost in passing—fits with the dazed and dead tone Butler conveys through his lyrics. But in the world outside the record, it’s callous and obnoxious, unpacked without grace or taste by a band who are historically committed to helping out those in need. Is this who they fear they’ll become, or is this who they have become? It’s a question the album fails to answer.
