One night near the end of April this year, my wife and I will be on the floor of the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, with several good friends and 20,000+ other people who have gathered for an Arcade Fire show. At some point that night, the band will play "Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)" from their latest album, Reflektor. About three minutes into that slow-building song—which foregrounds a lulling synth and Win Butler's mournful vocals over rolling drums—there will be a sudden break, a beat of ba-dum, ba-ba-dum, and an implicit invitation for the crowd to toss up their hands, lift their voices in one accord, and shout-sing the chorus: "I know there's a way / we can make 'em pay / Think it over and say / 'I'm never going back again.'"
A few minutes later we'll sing along, and probably sway, to a lamenting bridge: "We know there's a price to pay / For love in a reflective age." Tens of thousands of people in Denver, enjoying an anthem laced with lament, whose layers of sound (blended by music producer and LCD Soundsystem mastermind James Murphy) are matched to layers of cultural heritage combining Greek myth, Kierkegaard, and The Beatles. (That song's finale will raise our voices in another kind of chorus, a chant of Orpheus-meets-Paul McCartney: "La la — La la la — La la la la la — La la la la.") I can hardly wait.
More than any other major band working today, Arcade Fire is a rock band for our time. Their songs concern some of the most familiar features of our age—digital media, suburban blight, individualistic spirituality—attached in lead singer Win Butler's lyrics to universal themes—alienation, friendship, religious belief, childhood, war, play, love. Arcade Fire is a Very Serious Band, you might say, with a lot on its mind, known for calling us together to proclaim rock anthems about our us-ness. Their soundscapes are expansive but filled with delicate details, and likewise, even their biggest anthems—"Wake Up" from 2004's Funeral, "Keep the Car Running" from 2007's Neon Bible, "Sprawl II" from 2010's Grammy-winning The Suburbs—draw our attention to the quotidian, especially the quotidian of our memories. Arcade Fire songs are about the homes where our lives are lived, the parents who named us, the friends we've found and those we have left behind. They sing about all of us by inviting us to reflect on ourselves.
A Mission Statement
If that sounds cloying and pretentious, okay, fine, but at least the band is on the level. On Reflektor, a song called "Flashbulb Eyes" asks, "What if the camera really do [sic] take your soul? Oh no!" Another, "Normal Person," asks, "Is anything as strange as a normal person?" and ends up admitting, "I've never really ever met a normal person." See? Pretty direct. Many of Butler's lyrics are more evocative and indirect than those, but straight stories are a band specialty.
They are also one of a handful of popular musical acts today who can call their own shots and release exactly the music they want to release, in exactly the way they want to release it. For Reflektor, their first album in three years, Arcade Fire embarked last fall on a prolonged, odd-angled, multi-media promotional campaign. They performed secretive shows under the moniker "The Reflektors." They played (or appeared to play) as paper mache dolls at some live shows and on The Colbert Report. They streamed their whole album to YouTube, but just for one day. They worked with Google Chrome and longtime collaborator Vincent Morisset on a user-responsive web video for the album's title track.
All this was in service of an album that asks aching—and, again, big and familiar—questions about digital technology and how we respond to our age's onslaught of media images and disembodied messages. Every iteration of Reflektor's marketing campaign was an act of creation. This was no regular record rollout; it was a mission statement. The album title is a reference to Søren Kierkegaard's The Present Age (1846), an essay whose core concern is that we've entered an "age of reflection" consumed with endless but indolent cycles of information processing. Kierkegaard calls for a "passionate age" where people don't just consume and critique, but create and contribute. Hey Kierkegaard, says Arcade Fire, can you give us a hand in the 21st century?
So yes, Arcade Fire is a Very Serious Band, and their seriousness is worn all over their sleeves. Reflektor is separated into two discs, and if you want to try, you can make a lot of sense of the two collections, the stories they tell, and their respective themes. One friend of mine astutely observed that Disc 1 is about the band rethinking what it means to be a rock band, then reintroducing themselves to us. ("Do you like rock and roll music?" Butler warbles at the opening of one track, then answers, "Cause I don't know if I do." The next song begins with a new—or just another?—introduction: "Ladies and gentleman, Arcade Fire!") Disc 2 has final things on its mind, with a two-song exchange between the Greek god Orpheus and his maiden, Eurydice, who is trapped in the underworld while Orpheus calls to her endlessly, while she encourages him to desist. A penultimate track dismisses traditional conceptions of the afterlife in favor of working out the life we're living in now.
Hold Your Mistake Up
But if I go much further into this, this review will become, to quote our heroes' latest title track, "just a reflection of a reflection of a reflection." And to be sure, I don't turn to Arcade Fire for their reflections, but for their creations. I just love their music, especially 2004's Funeral and this new album of 13 infectious tracks. Everyone has been calling Reflektor dance music, in part because James Murphy is so excellent at crafting such music, but I prefer to say that it's simply kinetic. These are songs to move to—at a dance party, at a hop-along concert, on a head-bobbing stroll. For me, they've been ideal companions on several long runs, the music bouncing and bounding with me on a mixture of neighborhood streets and foothill trails. Reflektor is body-moving music.
But in moving along with Arcade Fire, I've come to think with them, too, and their big messages have been floating through my brain and heart for years now. Perhaps it's best that I illustrate this point not with a reflection, but a creation—a (very) short story. Herewith, my finale:
A couple of years back, I went to the grocery store with all three of my young children and without a shopping list. It was a hard trip, as grocery trips go, and it came at the end of a rather hard day. The kids were manic, I was stressed, we overspent our budget, and at one point (maybe two points) I snapped at them. A dark cloud filled the car on the drive home. I got to thinking about all the mistakes I had made in life, and how those mistakes had led to just such a grocery trip, and now everything was ruined. (I might have been overdoing it just a little. You feel me, Win Butler?)
Then we were home and I was putting away groceries. My wife was in the kitchen preparing dinner, and she had the album Funeral playing. "Wake Up" was on, and I turned it up and tuned in:
Someone filled up
My heart with nothing
Someone told me not to cry.But now that I'm older
My heart's colder
I can see that it's a lie.Children, wake up.
Hold your mistake up.
Before they turn the summer into dust.
I believed every word of that song in that moment, and it got to me. Yes, that's it! At some point I was told not to cry, to keep the heart safe and cold. But now I'm older, and Yes! I can see it's a lie. To be alive is to hold your mistake up, proclaim it, deal with it, and bring on more life.
My eyes filled with tears as the song played, but from its opening grungy guitar riff and howls of "Oh Oh — OH OH OH OH," you can't just cry to "Wake Up." You have to move to it. The spirit hit me as we put those groceries away, and my children and wife joined in, and I kid you not when I say that halfway through the song, we were all dancing in the kitchen, jumping around, howling "Oh Oh — OH OH OH OH" with Arcade Fire, and feeling like all would be well. We shook off the funk, and, yes, woke up.
Patton Dodd (@pattondodd) is editor-in-chief of OnFaith.
