Album Review: Arcade Fire – Reflektor

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Album Review: Arcade Fire – Reflektor

Arcade Fire’s fourth album is a daring and emotional masterpiece. Alex Killeen reviews

Wednesday 30 October 2013

From the likes of Funeral to Neon Bible to The Suburbs and now, listening to Arcade Fire feels less like casual background music and more like religious revelry. It’s epic, haunting and ultimately, leaves you speechless. The pure surrealism Arcade Fire injects into their album tracks is never ending. Presumptions are nothing, each track an individual set piece in a wider web.

Their most recent single, ‘Reflektor’, kicks off the album and is a 7-Minute brawl between the piano, violin, guitar, bass, drums, vocals and whatever else they can find. The mash-up between Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, lyrically, tussles in both pitch and language- alternating between French and English. It’s mental. I could think of no other way to begin an Arcade Fire album.

The 75-minute immersion doesn’t let up, it doesn’t let you get comfortable, and it doesn’t conform to sort of convention. And I suppose purposely so. If you like blues that blends into screeching guitar mashing, it’s there, if you like pounding rock-reggae it’s there. It’s jack-of-all-trades that masters most. From pop in ‘Here Comes the Night Time’, to anti-pop in ‘Here Comes the Night Time II’. It’s self-referential, self- juxtaposing, self-embellishing. The band members clearly just enjoy seeing how far they can go, exploring the full capabilities of an instrument.

Then, an interval, closing on that classic Arcade Fire sound in ‘You Already Know’ and ‘Joan Of Arc’. When disc two starts up with ‘Here Comes The Night II’, it moves away from the bombastic and toward theatrical heart break, like a lamentation for escape from the fame the previous half yearned for. The disjointedness of ‘Awful Sound’ and gravitas of ‘It’s Never Over’, the outright ludicrousness of ‘Porno’ and the desperateness in ‘Afterlife’ creates a cornucopia of emotional exploration.

It can be difficult to listen to, trebles razor sharp and bass that pounds away until there’s nothing left. But the rewards outweigh the difficulties and the meaning transcends them.

Arcade Fire’s foray into the dark underbelly of music, love, sin and enticement is unique and astoundingly http://nouse.co.uk/2013/10/30/album-review-arcade-fire-reflektor Archived 11 Dec 2018 06:49:24 Nouse Web Archives Album Review: Arcade Fire – Reflektor Page 2 of 3

fresh. The daringness of this is of a new level; just make sure you have a comfy spot to fully enjoy this not just as an album, but as an experience.

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One comment

Seb Chambers 1 Nov ’13 at 5:29 pm

This is awful. It’s basically ‘Look at me, I’m a massive hipster and love Arcade Fire more than my own parents, and look how many big words I can cram in to prove it’

I appreciate that you’re clearly a massive Arcade Fire fan, but this is really not the right way to go about reviewing an album.

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