Arcade Fire – Reflektor (Merge)
For years now I have been ambivalent about Arcade Fire. I have watched them grow from obscure indie darlings to Grammy-winning, Madison Square Garden-selling out industry staples–all while never quite being able to decide if I liked their music or not.
Arcade Fire – Reflektor (Merge)
For years now I have been ambivalent about Arcade Fire. I have watched them grow from obscure indie darlings to Grammy-winning, Madison Square Garden-selling out industry staples–all while never quite being able to decide if I liked their music or not. While all my other friends ranted and raved about Neon Bible and Funeral, I always found myself underwhelmed by the band’s over the top larger than life bombast.
Several weeks ago, upon hearing “Reflektor,” the first single and title track from their new record, I found myself surprisingly moved and intrigued, in a way that hadn’t really struck me before in my experience with Arcade Fire. The song is a sinewy and taut exploration of the power of the beat, pairing the group’s penchant for anthemic bursts of sound with a Kraftwerk-like minimalist pulse that spirals into a sea of shimmering guitars and electronic noise. The groove-heavy production on Arcade Fire’s new record is indebted to none other than one of the premier gurus of 21st century dance music, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. Murphy’s signature percussion-heavy sound pairs nicely with Arcade Fire’s restless Americana and folk influences, cutting the group’s typical schmaltz and theatrics in half in a way that evokes a sense of urgency and intensity to their music that it had previously lacked.
Arcade Fire’s fascination with Caribbean music and culture has been growing for some time, but on Reflektor the band goes full-on early in the album, drawing from reggaeton, dancehall, ska, and calypso music and sounds. They manage to do this in a way that avoids the typically patronizing and parodying nature of indie and white artists co-opting island music into their sound. On the track “Flashbulb Eyes,” Arcade Fire and Murphy create a texturally-rich dub rhythm that incorporates the trademark staccato bass lines and reverberated drums of reggae music. The song also features an aching vocal from the group’s frontman, Win Butler, who keeps the hybrid sound exciting and intriguing with his performance and delivery. Subsequent track “Here Comes the Night Time” pairs the dark and reverent 80s-influenced electro-folk sound Arcade Fire has been developing for some time with two fascinating bridges. The song combines the juxtaposed forces of a driving and frantically hypnotic carnival march with a delicate and rather colonial-sounding piano break–one could almost read this as a commentary on the two different cultural legacies sewn into Caribbean music, culture, and history. Whether the extent to which Arcade Fire has incorporated Caribbean imagery, people, and culture into Reflektor‘s marketing and media campaign constitutes white corporate cultural appropriation or not is still up in the air, and I’ll leave it up to someone more qualified than myself to make that call. However, musically the group explores the cultural sonic pallette in a way that is tasteful, and feels complimentary of the culture, rather than taking a condescending approach.
Arcade Fire have reached a level of success and skill few bands ever achieve, and their mastery of their craft is palatable on Reflektor, exploring various musical landscapes and stylistic influences with an ease and overall coherence that is evocative of sprawling masterworks like The White Album, Speakerboxx/The Love Below, and Zen Arcade. The group’s willingness to experiment is evident on the massive mid-album track “Joan of Arc,” which starts as a tom-heavy driving, anthemic arena rocker. Eventually, though, it dissolves into over ten minutes of looping reversed tracks and sounds that appear to be sampled from the album opener, “Reflektor.” These loops and noises slip through the stereo spectrum in a dizzying kaleidoscopic mess that nearly gives “Revolution 9” a run for its money as the most ostentatious display of artistic freedom by a commercially successful artist in pop music history.
Reflektor is an expansive and enrapturing record that I can without a doubt declare the best thing I have heard Arcade Fire produce. With Murphy’s production, Arcade Fire have managed to produce a fascinating mixture of electronic and analog sounds. They blend pop, dance, disco, folk, and Caribbean music into a forward-thinking and emotional sound. Reflektor is a continually unfolding exploration of different rhythmic textures and tempos that add up to Arcade Fire’s most interesting and vital work to date. I think they may have finally won me over.
