"WE": The Arcade Fire we used to love

These are interesting times for Arcade Fire. With 2017’s Everything Now, Montreal’s 00s alt-figureheads suffered their steepest dip of critical momentum since 2004’s ecstatic Funeral. Latterly, live show-stealer Will Butler’s departure - however amicable - can’t help but present further challenges.

Continuing a policy seemingly set with 2013’s Reflektor - Scary Monsters via Achtung Baby - the band’s response seems to be to “do a U2”. In the early 00s, Bono’s boys followed their postmodern 90s grandstanding with smaller-than-usual gigs, featuring their frontman speechifying about “reapplying for the job” of the world’s best band. Likewise, Arcade Fire’s sixth album arrives with the lofty pre-release campaigns of Reflektor/Everything Now replaced by intimate, pay-what-you-can benefit gigs in New York and none-more-00s single The Lightning I, II. “We missed you,” read postcards to fans, suggesting a return to the band you once knew.

Not that Arcade Fire have ditched the conceptual trappings wholesale. WE is an album of two sides, one gloomy, the other guardedly hopeful. The songs break down into parts. But it does suggest an attempted rapprochement between formative band instincts and recent digressions, framed within state-of-the-now reflections. Hence opener Age Of Anxiety I, whose introduction resembles Funeral's Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels) given a wiser, sadder makeover, with a piano sounding out sorrowfully over a tender pulse.

If Everything Now's readings of media-age malaise leant towards the grindingly obvious, WE is a partial improvement, give or take singer Win Butler’s occasional clunking takes on modern-life exhaustion. “I unsubscribe... fuck season 5,” he laments on End Of The Empire l-IV, sounding not unlike someone losing faith in The Walking Dead and perhaps mistaking broad relatability for inspired insight.

Anxiety I suffers similarly, evoking wearying times in wearied frameworks, until the gear-shift moment in ...Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole) reminds you what Arcade Fire do so well. After a portentous call-and- response opening, Rabbit Hole hits a frisky disco stride, rediscovering that rush of seize-the-moment energy that propelled the band to arenas.

Subscription gripes and lapses into cliché (“I don’t believe the hype”) aside, ...Empire l-IV’s melodically lush end-of-days symphony is better still. After live covers of Give Peace A Chance, the result brings to mind John and Yoko via Bowie and A Day In The Life, a high-aiming mix that Arcade Fire get away with thanks to the pay-off’s dreamy reminder that, yes, this is still the band who wrote Intervention.

The Lightning I, II sustains that ambition in a volleying cry of hope before catastrophe. While the imagery again evokes the apocalypse, the message of resilience (“Don’t quit”) hits home hard as the three-minute mark kickstarts an orch-rock gallop evocative of The Suburbs' Ready To Start, or Springsteen and The Killers stirring the stadium-rock heartland.

Unconditional I (Lookout Kid) is a lighter call for uplift, its buoyant melody and string arrangement well-suited to simple but festival-ready messages of self-forgiveness. The same can be said for the Regine Chassagne-fronted devotional of Unconditional II (Race And Religion), the closest WE comes to Everything Now's disco ditties, albeit with that album’s A-level banalities replaced by reflections on unifying love. If they’re no less platitudinous, at least they suit the song’s carefree spritz.

WE closes with the title track, an appealingly tentative acoustic lament if not quite the full- blooded climax an album of modern horrors and hopes might require. “When everything ends / Can we do it again?” asks Butler, presumably thinking globally. But you could also read the lyric as a reflection on his band, trying to execute a rebirth at a transitional point. As to whether they fulfil that restart bid, the answer is guardedly affirmative, in keeping with WE's two-sided balance of ongoing struggle and endurance.

 

From Record Collector (June 2022)