Archived Edition: April 11, 2007 | Back to Current	Jul 31, 2010

Arcade Fire, burning brightly
Miles Klee - SENIOR WRITER

Neon Bible, the perfectly decadent sophomore album from Montreal’s Arcade Fire, seized the #2 position on the U.S. Billboard 200 charts the week it arrived in stores. 92,000 copies were snatched up within a matter of days. If the ludicrousness of this fact is lost on you, consider that only Notorious B.I.G. and his posthumous Greatest Hits were able to outsell these indie darlings.

That’s some real bank for a band that could have easily retreated from the limelight. White people spouting Creole proverbs? Bandmate Régine Chassagne may be from Haiti, but still. Also, show me another group that got this popular by lacing their songs with droning strains of hurdy-gurdy or mournful French horn and I’ll eat my hat. To say nothing of the fact that they single-handedly vaulted Merge, their independent label, into similar prominence. So, quite a few people bet the farm on Neon Bible being a revelation and Arcade Fire becoming Canada’s hottest musical export.

There’s nothing someone can say about this album that a critic has not put in gushing terms already: suffice it to say, too much of a good thing turns out to be just what the doctor ordered. The gleeful abundance of people (ten in the touring group) instruments (well over a dozen that are regularly used), though, is nothing compared to the mini-symphonies themselves, which embrace an apocalyptic grandeur that’s as necessary as it is crushing. Band leader Win Butler’s rangy voice becomes the tightrope that his colleagues now walk with ease as the whole gothic circus tent threatens to collapse. And yet the loose shimmer of their sound belies a precision any rock musician would be hard-pressed to match.

“Intervention” bats clean-up on the album and is a real standout in those terms, teasing with phantom-ridden organ and a miniature bell orchestra, the latter somehow invoking Springsteen, before giving way to epic instincts, slurred cello and Butler’s lyrics at their most ferocious: “Who’s gonna throw the very first stone? / O, who’s gonna reset the bone?”

That reminds me: if you dislike music which appropriates and inverts biblical imagery, steer clear of this album. Whether somebody’s forsaking their family for God or claiming to be more devout than they are (see the full-bodied “Antichrist Television Blues”), these characters are not exactly poster children for Jesus-centered fundamentalism.

One surprising benefit of the mostly non-stop opulence is that the few understated tracks achieve a chilling sparseness. Title track “Neon Bible” captures the despair of John Kennedy Toole, who wrote the novel of the same name. A troubled heartbeat, some spectral hums, and a barely-there bed of strings gloss over poetry which makes it clear that religion itself is not the enemy, rather people who pimp it: “Took the poison of her age / To lick your fingers when you turn the page … Neon bible / Not much chance for survival / With a neon bible.”

Still, pyrotechnics abound, to the point where instrumental jubilance overshadows darker subject matter. Second single “Keep The Car Running” weds bright Gaelic inflections to sweeping rock majesty, partially obscuring the harrowing dive into a getaway driver’s paranoia. Opener “Black Mirror,” on the other hand, rubs your nose in the shadowy and garish future imagined by subsequent tracks, rollicking grand piano throwing one down a creepy rabbit hole.

But where Funeral, Neon Bible’s predecessor, found its agonies immanent, the focus has suddenly shifted to transcendence; I would have no qualms saying this is an album about simply everything, from determinist nightmares (“Ocean Of Noise”) to meditations on impermanence (“Black Wave/Bad Vibrations,” whose backing female harmonies pile up into the firmament with cold, computerized precision).

If there is an indication that the Arcade Fire are not quite ready for what they attempt, it is the way in which the album tracks their return to solipsist forms of sadness – “Windowsill” charts the MTV generation’s tortured desire to be oblivious and, like most of these songs, the anxiety that comes along with waiting for the other world-ending shoe to drop. Finally, closer “My Body Is A Cage” is both the scariest thing they have ever recorded and a return to the interiority they relish, an immolation that names death the ultimate form of freedom. Funeral was a psychic dissection of the mind that has lost one of its own, but now we are given access to the dying themselves.

Heavy stuff, to be sure, but it’s what we have come to expect from these guys: songs as big on philosophy as noise, bold and ravaging anthems with endless scope that sound like nothing else out there. Neon Bible delivers.