WE
Album by Arcade Fire
Released 6 May 2022
Art Rock
Label – Columbia
Rating – 6/10
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The influence of Arcade Fire’s Funeral remains. The Montreal group’s 2004 debut bred a delirious chamber-on-indie tone that lives in those making similarly lauded albums today, see Black Country, New Road. Darkness swelled through follow-up Neon Bible, via inscrutable mixes of digital and analogue, whilst the heartlands roared through The Suburbs, and cave-like disco through the slightly more polarising Reflektor.
If you were to do what I seem to be doing and speed run through Arcade Fire’s discography, the sudden stop appears on 2017’s Everything Now; a disco/throwback pop aesthetic now full-blown, as opposed to the stylistic overlaps that occurred throughout Reflektor, comprised of genuine ABBA clones and ugly-as-sin reggae like Chemistry.
Little influence has survived outside of Funeral, despite the triumphs of a number of its successors. The Everything Now brick wall seems to exist mainly due to Arcade Fire’s perpetual search for identity; there was never going to be another Funeral, their albums were always going to differentiate heavily from one another, but their saving grace, combining the ambitions influenced by their oddball heroes with forward-thought, seemed to die long ago.
But there’s another ‘however’. Getting wild with disco on Everything Now could actually be considered an ambitious step, at least, it could be when compared with new album WE. Ambition exists only in WE’s concept, haunted by the maddening effect modern culture has on all of us, whilst providing the occasional life lesson. That in and of itself is a cliché, but that doesn’t mean the art it evokes has to appear so cliched, but WE is the tamest album Arcade Fire have produced at this point, trading risks for piano rock and the kind of anthemics on the same tier as a cheesy ‘80s rock record.
It’s still better than Everything Now, simply because it doesn’t take enough risks to be quite as offensive. It’s also not without its gems, floating through the five-song setup of the album, cut up into a total of ten tracks, as most of the tunes are made up of two movements. Let’s check those segments out, one-by-one, and work out how, if at all, they differentiate from one another. Whew, this has been a long intro…
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Age of Anxiety
Boy, social media really is going to be the downfall of us all, isn’t it? It’s up there with technology rising up and taking over or cancel culture or maybe we should dial back a few decades to where Africanised bees were the core worry. Age of Anxiety – split into a first part and a second subtitled Rabbit Hole – isn’t even the worst offender where this pseudo-conscious jargon is concerned (we’ll get to that). The worst aspect of part one is its immediate Coldplay-isms; a faux-sobering seriousness placed against a melancholy gin bar piano, before the stadium show lights start blinking in the form of spacey synthesisers, set to inspire but they likely won’t. Arcade Fire’s lights have a little more energy than your standard Coldplay show, succumbing to the mildest saving grace possible. Rabbit Hole is miserable; either Regine Chassagne’s voice is used sparingly on the track (or on WE in general) or to no worthwhile effect, chiming in with a hushed “yeah” backing vocal at the end of each line, just to remind us she’s still there in the most shoehorned fashion. She gets to do a little more later on, but at that point, my mood has been ruined by so many “rabbit hole…yeah” repetitions.
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End of the Empire
Man, who doesn’t End of the Empire I-III sound like? Everybody has done this post-Beatles, Electric Light Orchestra–Oasis take on (is it or is it not) baroque pop at some point. I’d say that Jet may as well have made it, but that’d be both cruel and untrue, because the song features some of the album’s most glorious moments, from vocal melodies that try to adopt John Lennon’s Imagine, to a booming finale of “it’s you and I / it’s do or die / suicide mission, baby by my side” that may jerk a few tears. It’s nice to know that Arcade Fire can still pen a song that pleasantly builds to such a euphoric, allaying moment. No such practice occurs on part IV (Sagittarius A*); the cheapest pseudo-relatable lyrics, featuring a glassy-eyed “unsubscribe” mantra – this is the hammy, ‘social media will destroy us’ nothingness I sarcastically alluded to in Age of Anxiety. Maybe they’re just trying to get the kids on board, rather than those who always backed them for the maturity of their music – who knows? I just don’t agree with dumbing your message down to reel people in.
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The Lightning
If End of the Empire I-III is allaying, The Lightning (both parts) is out to challenge its purity, pledging to take the album’s top, cathartic spot. The passion of WE yearns to lead to something, a potential rallying cry or post-rock-style crescendo that every concert-attendee will sing along with as tears roll down their cheeks. Promise and despondency in one, pessimism is bitten by rose-tints, revving through the “we can make it if you don’t quit on me” highs of part one – very Heartland, much like The Suburbs. If those aren’t the singalongs I mentioned, that’d be the entirety of the song’s second part, cruising and soaring like a car that suddenly launches from the highway, finalised by pick-me-up lyrics, including Win and Regine’s “waiting on the lightning” duet; a moment of pure unification.
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Unconditional
There’s a small part of me that feels Unconditional I (Lookout Kid) would slot itself into Funeral fairly well, or maybe that’s just in comparison to the rest of WE. The hope-within-the-bones simplicity of its disposition resembles the tender moments of Funeral – complete with a string solo – succumbing to a full circle in sound and concept; this is Win Butler and Regine Chassagne’s song for their child, serious but loving, as opposed to the not-so-serious but loving persuasion of David Bowie’s Kooks. It also works as an appropriately friendly mental health anthem, or a song for your children:
“Lookout kid, trust your mind,
But you can’t trust it every time,
You know it plays tricks on you,
And it don’t give a damn if you are happy or you’re sad,
But if you’ve lost it, don’t feel bad,
‘Cause it’s alright to be sad”.
Ha, I almost choked up, and I’m childless. Unconditional II (Race and Religion) contains actual use of Regine, perhaps the perfect way to follow up a song about her child. It’s this album’s Sprawl II / Electric Blue, half-disco, throbbing with synths like Blondie’s Heart of Glass, kind of buddying up to Peter Gabriel’s feature, but also kind of not. Its cheesy “UNITED BODY AND SOUL” hook leaves me wishing the band had put a little more care into the song, but we can’t have it all. Now do Solsbury Hill.
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WE
Classifying the title track as ‘dull’ would feel like a copout. That being said, there isn’t much more to say about it. It isn’t the most blasé hope-ballad in the world, but it also doesn’t feature much that will unchain it from other blasé hope-ballads. Its namesake, the Yevgeny Zamyatin sci-fi novel, is an intriguing influence, but I’m sure there are other indie songs with high-brow inspiration that ends up lost in translation. It’s great if you like acoustic guitars, and surface-scratching sincerity. An anticlimactic song that will produce anticlimactic ends to album reviews.
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