More on: Arcade Fire

Label: Mercury
Release Date: 05/03/07
Rating:

If 'Funeral' was ironic and goofily playful - enacting intensely romantic and emotional mind games in a sleepy snowed-under neighbourhood, then 'Neon Bible' is earnest and moralistically cynical, playing out feverishly paranoid head-case games in a big, violent world of surveillance facing imminent,
perhaps irredeemable, self-destruction.

The only 'safe', albeit fantastical, place to run away to and find some kind of peace and innocent existence is the no-through road Eden "between the click of the light/and the start of the dream" on 'No Cars Go', tellingly the only track here not originally written for this album. Thanks to its superb, complex, big-budget arrangement and production, the now seven-strong Montreal group have transformed the bare-bones song on their self-released 2003 EP into an euphoric masterpiece, the sole track on 'Neon Bible' that could have undeniably merited inclusion on 'Funeral'. The Morricone soundtrack-like climax, with Win Butler's trademark impassioned vocal, and strings, brass, gospel choir all propelled by snares potholing the beat is particularly thrilling, even if it seems out of place.

The remainder of the album may initially disappoint 'Funeral' fans; it is less immediate and dynamically exciting as 'No Cars Go' and the jet-fuelled songs from the debut album. Gone is the raucously savage electric guitar attack of Butler's 12 string and Parry's Rickenbacker on tracks like 'Laika'. Furthermore Butler's vocals and lyrics are less impassioned and more world-weary. Not to mention that 'Neon Bible''s equivalents to 'Funeral''s folk and country numbers are epic stately ballads ('Intervention', 'Ocean of Noise', 'My Body Is A Cage') which may lose Arcade Fire some of their indie royalty cred.

All of which, however, judged in its own right makes for a very listenable and accessible stadium-filling rock album, and even 'Funeral' fanatics may succumb after several listens. 'Keep The Car Running' and '(Antichrist Television Blues)' are great toe-tapping '80s Springsteen-like rockers; Butler's treacle-thick croon on the latter delirious with post-9/11 trauma ("The planes keep crashing, always two by two"). This track encapsulates the cynicism running throughout the album: after thirteen verses eulogising his daughter, the singer stops the song dead with the words, "Am I the Antichrist?", forcing us to re-interpret his character. He self-justifies his greedy exploitative nature by using 'heaven', which he probably doesn't believe in, as a place where the exploited will find sanctity, so what the hell does it matter what we do now when we're all going to die soon anyway?

Jean de la Fontaine's fable 'The Wolf and The Fox', on which the lyrics to 'The Well and the Lighthouse' are based, perhaps best epitomises 'Neon Bible''s morality code. The well symbolises man's lust for wealth, possessions and power, and the lighthouse a chance for redemption, but it is a kind of purgatory, not the Second Coming. Butler's persona may or may not believe he is blinded by the silver but he certainly doesn't believe that he or mankind are redeemable.

Any last gasp advice then? In 'Keep the car running', "Men are coming to take me away" Butler bemoans, perhaps to the silvery well, to a meaningless life with crap TV and 'useless' cataclismically destructive leaders (see 'Intervention'), or perhaps to conscript him for World War III (see 'Black Wave/Bad Vibrations'). As Hornby summarised Springsteen's restlessness in 'High Fidelity': 'Stay and rot' or 'escape and burn.'

Jon Parry

Arcade Fire Official Site
Merge Records
Rough Trade Records