#2545 Arcade Fire - Everything Now

I have this tendency, the causality of which is unclear, to love the outlier album people seemed disappointed by.

A lover of Vitalogy, of Zooropa, of Amnesiac, Surrender, Congratulations, Nimrod, Tiny Music, Adore*

Possible theories:
a) everyone's blinded by expectation and ignores something perfectly good on its own merits
b) I'm a contrarian douche who wants to like the thing nobody else does
c) I wasn't actually that into what Pearl Jam, U2, Chemical Brothers, MGMT, et al. were doing, so a swerve into the bushes came upon me

Sometimes I call this the 3rd album phenomenon. I compiled that list without a thought for that parallel track, but backtracing that covers 3 of those, more if you're willing to start 1 at the first popular album.

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But now, what a trap this little beastie is.

Consensuswise, is this a "disappointing album"?

Do I love it?

hrm

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Brasstacks:

It's a listless little shit, full of reluctantly danceable backbeats, reminding me of another love-hate victim, the bloodless, even-more-unabashedly-disco RAM.

But I can't help but feel like some of the backlash has involved the _concept_ of Arcade Fire - their rightfully-hateable dress-coded shows, their sub-Radiohead post-media-media blitz, their run of mostly-undeservedly critically-unassailable albums, their unrelentingly arch primness in the face of a world that makes all that horseshit seem frivolous. And more specifically, their idea that this album was some statement on the superficial simmering we're all cooking in, while itself seeming tied up in it, sneering smugly down from tippy-toes.

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But I think this album knows that there's no room for Arcade Fire in this world. What move's left to them, a band that started their career with an album ruminating in hopelessness and death, grasping the barest sunbeam through ever-shut shutters? Are they supposed to keep dancing and fighting when the entire world is, by any reasonable approximation COMPLETELY FUCKED ?

Maybe rolling around in the pit, a gallows shuffle as the last gasp of Reflektor's dance, a dying twitch of a disco hip-flick, maybe that's all there is.

--

Look, I like this record a lot. I think its hooky, and desperate in its late-era Flaming Lips kinda way without being actually depressing. On my third listen, spaced from the first two, I already remembered the throughlines. And if its limp its because we live in limp times. And if we find an era beyond this, I think we'll look back at this as the miserable Arcade Fire album, and be reminded of why 4.5/5

* jk, fuck adore*

* though you know what? I'll be there's a contingent of people out there who weren't that into Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie who love that one.