Arcade Fire, Everything Now review: Maturing but still asking questions

The sound of a band coming back to what they've always done best says Richard Godwin
Mature sound: Arcade Fire's new album Everything Now
Richard Godwin28 July 2017

Canadian art-rock motorcade Arcade Fire heralded their fifth album by creating their own fake news site, Stereoyum, to host their parodic meta-review: “It’s likely … that we’ll compare Everything Now unfavourably to both Funeral and The Suburbs, while calling it a bounceback after Reflektor.”

The album’s binding themes — instant gratification, media saturation, the youth of today — might be more expected from cynical newspaper commentators such as me than a band beloved for their heart. Still, when you can come up with a couplet like “God make me famous / If you can’t just make it painless” and drop it into a glam disco stomp about teen suicide, you can make anything sing.

Everything Now is the sound of Win Butler and cohorts approaching middle age, feeling perturbed and daring to look askance at their audience. Infinite Content (a cousin of Father John Misty’s Total Entertainment Forever) appears twice, once as a dance tune, once as a ballad, so as to underscore its message that infinite content doesn’t provide infinite contentment.

But there is such gory vitality in tunes such as Chemistry, Electric Blue and We Don’t Deserve Love that finally the band come back to what they’ve always done best, which is hauling the listener by the lapels and yelling “THIS IS REAL, COME ON WAKE UP, LET’S RUN AWAY NOW!” Cynics are always romantics at heart.

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