Artist: Arcade Fire
Title: Reflektor
Genre: Indie-Pop
Release Date: 28th October 2013
Label: Sonovox (Universal)
Album Review
Yes, they kept us in suspense!
It all started in early august with some cryptic graffiti, popping up on walls in cities around the globe, depicting the letters R-E-F-L-E-K-T-O-R.
Next the videos came, the blurred ones, shadowy silhouettes, ghosting through the net, accompanied with musical fragments and the mysterious symbol again. When posters appeared, stamped with symbol and a concrete date (9/9/9pm) the rumours grew stronger that it all was about the new ARCADE FIRE album, getting unveiled on (of course) September, the 9th with the release of the first single ‘Reflektor’, confusingly enough credited to the fictional band THE REFLEKTORS (a pseudonym the band used for some secret shows too). So you can call it a kind of a paper chase release and the question now is: was it worth the thrill? I wish I could answer that.
To start off with a fact; ‘Reflektor’ is not what you might have expected if its predecessors are part of your music collection already. Influenced and inspired by i.e. Caribbean folk (the band´s female voice Régine Chassagne has relational links to Haiti), the album features stylistics, which are more than unusual (I don´t dare to say disconcerting) for the Canadian outfit. Take the raga-muffin-like sound of ‘Flashbulb Eyes’ or the samba coat of ‘Here comes the Night Time’. Putting the vocals aside, it is hard to realize that this is the same band, which is responsible for songs like ‘Wake Up’ or ‘No Cars Go’! But that seems to underline Win Butler´s statement: ”Going to Haiti for the first time with Regine... changed me musically, just really opened me up to this huge, vast amount of culture and influence I hadn't been exposed to before, which was really life-changing...“ So is ‘Reflektor’ a logical progress, or a musical epiphany?
On the one hand it was foreseeable and occasionally necessary to leave the familiar musical harbours for avoiding standstill, repetition and self-quotations (it felt that ‘The Suburbs’ were some kind of an unpreventable roads end), but on the other; what remains if you leave the cocoon almost completely changed, free from all those bones that sustained you? What if no one will recognize you in foreign waters? Musically ‘Reflektor’ eludes sadistically from the relation to its siblings ‘Funeral’, ‘Neon Bible’ and ‘The Suburbs’ for long periods and this could cause some confusion, not to say disappointment if you´ve expected another bunch of handmade indie-rock songs. But this does not mean that the songs are bad! James Murphy (former mastermind of the alternative dance pioneers LCD SOUNDSYSTEM) did a hell of a job on the songs, disrobed the band of its instrumental clothes and painted their acoustic visage with a groovy electro dance make-up.
Of course it is still miles away from ordinary dance music! Too complex and too sidestepping is the structure, it´s layered density. Just take the mighty title track, a seven minutes ear-quake that starts as a Bee Gee-like disco stomper for becoming a maelstrom of echoes, electronic noises, swirling melodies, languages, rhythms and absorbing surfaces (featuring some ennobling guest vocals!). ‘We exist’ demonstrates prominently the crux that lurks at the threshold of many of the songs. You have the epic and sprawling choruses you are familiar with and then there are the verses, embedded in electronic layers and acoustic gimmicks, which seem to unstable for weight of the vocals sometimes, like a wooden bridge over wild waters. So it feels a bit like a release to reach ‘Normal Person’, what bears enjoyable references to the band´s oeuvre you know, sawing guitars, restless drums and an anthem-like refrain.
Same with ‘You already know’, whose rocking and rolling essence makes you remember that this is an ARCADE FIRE album you are listening to. ‘Joan Of Arc’ starts as noisy attack of cymbals and distortion, before it finds it shape in a kind of dance-pop-vaudeville. And that´s the factor, what makes the album so special, because it´s blend of styles and traits grants barely a second to lean back, let alone boredom! And that is the burden, placed in the head of the reviewer! It´s not what made you learn to appreciate the band, but it´s heady and excitingly different. ‘Awful Sound’ combines bittersweet electronic lights with an emphatic Lennon-like chorus, ‘It´s never over’ is again dominated by stamping disco beats, whereas ‘Porno’ sounds like a remnant of the synth-pop era of the early eighties. ‘Afterlife’ comes along like a dance remix of an ARCADE FIRE song you could swear to have heard already and when the relaxing, ambient-electro ballad ‘Supersymmetry’ closes the album´s curtain you are as wise as before.
I have to confess that this is the first review I started to write without any kind of conclusion in my head. I like the album, but it´s not the music I was waiting for, I anticipated! So is it a wrong progress or am I just too narrow-minded? Somehow it feels like a testing ground, a laboratory of options and ways, like a project that allows the creativity to wheel free, to stretch the borders and in that light it is a thrilling and exceptional record. It might leave you cold if you have awaited a stylistic continuation of their last outputs, but it grips you if you are in contemporary indie-pop that balances skilfully on the border between compatibility and sophisticated art. And so they keep the tension down-the-line, leading to the open question: what comes next? Yes, they keep us in suspense!
Tracklist
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CD1 |
CD2 |
Line-up
Win Butler – Vocals, Guitar, Bass, Keyboards
Régine Chassagne – Vocals, Keyboards, Accordion
Richard Reed Parry – Bass, Piano, Guitar, Percussions
Tim Kingsbury – Bass, Guitar
Will Butler – Keyboards, Guitar, Percussions
Jeremy Gara – Drums, Keyboards
Website
www.arcadefire.com
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 7
Sound: 9
Total: 8 / 10
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