The reason why fake news stories get so much traction is because you really want to believe what you’re reading. Case in point, a recent yarn about an Arcade Fire film project involving Terry Gilliam, which was reported to have cost millions of dollars, taken up many years and was nowhere near completion. You wanted to believe this because, well…look, you wanted to believe it.
Turns out that this slice of fake news was probably generated by the band themselves or their people to plug the release of a new album Everything Now. Turns out the band decided that spoofery was the new rock’n’roll and went all out in the fake news stakes to fluff up the album release. Turns out that that Gilliam story wasn’t the only piece of fakery in circulation. And yes, we’re about to start talking about the album now.
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When Arcade Fire first heard the big music, you’d have got better odds on them lasting the course than most of the greyhounds who ran at Shelbourne Park last Saturday night. Their debut album Funeral remains one of those brave, bold, bracing, ambitious call-to-arms, a record full of ferocious energy and emotional girth which had the heft and the spirit to make you want to be a believer. The shows back in those early days completed the circle and turned many into evangelists. We were converted, we were fans and followers, we were ready for the rapture.
Like fake news believers, we willed their subsequent albums to be better than they actually were because we’d already written the narrative. Boy, we were wrong. I listened back to Neon Bible last week and realised that we’d been sold a pup. Worse, like so many music writers over the years, I’d sold the ordinary decent music fan a pup by raving about an album that just doesn’t stack up now and probably didn’t stack up then. Can I get a 'caveat emptor'? All reviews of a band’s second album after a glorious debut outing should come with caveat emptor, as well as other pithy Latin phrases in various shades of neon, flashing in the rear-view mirror. Et ipse ego faciam in musica si quis alium ita vult quod suus 'a bonus and all of that.
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Reviewers are a cursed class of coves. We often miss the woods for the trees when it comes to great moments because we’re not up with the lark and then praise some deadwood like Be Here Now to the hilt to make up for our oversight. We follow the shiny balloons and the glitter parades because we don’t want to be left behind and cop on too late to the futility of such strutting and positioning. We are too busy being fanboys and fangirls with laptops to really give a true impression of what we’re just heard. We want to be loved just like everyone else. Well, some of us do.
In the case of Arcade Fire, their peculiar strutting and positioning has led us to Everything Now, an album of pants. It’s bad enough that the band spent so much time polishing the fake news shtick to sell the album, with all of the clever-clogs deconstruction and clowning around acting as a distraction, but it’s worse that they exerted so much time and energy on such badly embroidered and ill-fitting pants.
A record which is puffed up on a misplaced sense of its own importance and weighed down by those dreary deadweights of ennui, irony, cynicism, earnestness, faux-solemnity and the kind of trite sloganeering which most of us grow out of at 14, it’s pants with a capital P. It hurts musically because there’s so little visceral excitement and it stings lyrically because it’s so unbelievably and incredibly trite. They’ve turned into U2 and that’s never a good look for anyone under the age of 57.
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The biggest problem is that they’re trying too hard and producing nothing in return. Rock’n’roll is supposed to be effortless and dazzling and exciting and sexy and breezy and natural. These are descriptions which you just can’t apply here. Instead, Arcade Fire sound weary and tired and bored, a band shockingly unsure of why they became a band in the first place.
There’s a sense too that much of their audience have abandoned both circus and clowns. When Arcade Fire played in Dublin in June 2014, they pulled over 40,000 people to Marlay Park. When they returned for a show in June just gone by, around 20,000 shuffled into Malahide Castle. Leaving aside the traditional and tiresome capital city northside/southside thing, that’s one hell of a drop in numbers in three years.
Everything Now is not a record which will bring that audience back to the fold. Its diminishing creative returns make it a frustrating listen, as you meet a band keen to put what they clearly consider to be strong intellectual muscle to work on sounds to unite the masses, but who come up short on both sides of that equation. There’s very little here to value, to treasure, to hold dear, to make you want to beat a drum or blow a trumpet. Arcade Fire need to hear the big music again and realise why they got into this game in the first place. The sooner they do that the better. Because that’s the only way, judging by this outing, that they can make Arcade Fire great again.
