After several weeks of intense hype and speculation, the fourth Arcade Fire album has finally landed. To call Reflektor ambitious is, well, an understatement of epic proportions. Let’s see: as well as being influenced by the heady spirit of Haitian Carnival, the album is produced by LCD Soundsystem main-man James Murphy, features a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from David Bowie, and borrows two of the more well-known characters from Greek mythology to further extrapolate Win Butler’s by now familiar bunch of anxieties. Oh, and it’s a double album.
But then again, when haven’t Arcade Fire been a band of ambition and excess? Still, as co-vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassange sings on Reflektor track Joan Of Arc, “If you shoot you’d better hit your mark”.
There are some great songs on Reflektor. The band’s recent stylistic leap into glitzy stadium-ready disco is best evidenced on the title track. Over the course of seven minutes, Reflektor shimmies and weaves, snake-like, through a dramatic brew of noir disco, all built around a pulsing, relentless beat. Here Comes The Night Time, with its Haitian rhythms and wonky calypso keyboard line, is also catchy as hell. Then there’s the subdued, psychedelic swirl of Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice), which serves as a potent reminder of the magic Arcade Fire are capable of when in full flight.
Unfortunately, though, there’s a lot of filler on the ultimately very bloated Reflektor. You Already Know, Joan of Arc: sure, they’re okay songs, but it’s Arcade Fire on auto-pilot. The over-long, unmelodic synth drone of Porno is like a Depeche Mode C-side. And Normal Person, with its histrionic FM-rock and inane lyrics, is surely the worst song Arcade Fire have committed to disc.
Which brings me to the lyrics. Man, what’s happened to Win Butler as a lyricist? The Funeral and Neon Bible records were filled with swathes of brilliant, insightful, uplifting, shattering lyrics (The Suburbs, with its bland nostalgia, was where things started to take a down-turn). Of late, Butler too often falls back on lazy, clichéd, amateurish polarities (day/night, light/dark). It’s a habit he needs to break.
Okay, so Reflektor falls quite a bit short of the band’s towering ambition. Still, it’s certainly no reason to jump ship on one of the great bands of our time.
BY WAYNE MARSHALL
Best Track: Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: TALKING HEADS, LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, DAVID BOWIE
In A Word: Bloated
