Arcade Fire: Neon Bible - Album Review
After Bloc Party’s rather lukewarm, uninspiring sophomore album last month, I awaited Arcade Fire’s follow-up to their stunning debut funeral with apprehensive anticipation. Making a second album after a critically acclaimed first has never been easy: bands are under pressure to “mature”, and at the same time still deliver whatever it was that drew the fans to listen in the first round. The curse of sophomore slump often leaves artists either trying too hard to prove or doing nothing to improve. Take the latest release from BP for example, A weekend in the city finds Kele Okereke crooning instead of roaring, the melody dictating the rhythm instead of the other way around, and the unbridled energy of Bloc Party smothered by cloying grandeur of a post-Achtung-Baby U2. Blame it on Jacknife Lee I guess.
The good news is I’ve been listening to Neon Bible for a week now and it is every bit as good as funeral. The theme has shifted from death to religion, the center from the neighborhood to the state, the sound is fuller and the production tighter, but it’s the same emotional satisfying experience we’ve come to expect of Arcade Fire:
Black Mirror is an eerie and apocalyptic opener that sets the tone for Neon Bible, with brooding thunder afar and tides of cold and relentless bass rising and ebbing throughout the song. In an age of security cameras (Big Brother?) where “all words will lose their meaning” (Newspeak?) Win Butler asks morbidly, “mirror mirror on the wall, show me where them bombs will fall”. Fans of Final Fantasy will easily recognize Owen Pallet’s gorgeous string arrangement.
Keep the car running picks up the tempo with an upbeat mandolin and has a Springsteen-esque feel to it. Think of Josef K. when you hear the line, “The men are coming to take me away / I don’t know why but I can’t stay”. Welcome to the age of fear, where “they know my name cause I told it to them / but they don’t know how and they don’t know / when it’s coming”. Whether it’s state oppression or religious persecution, the fugitive is already surmising his doom. But still, keep the car running…
Neon Bible has husband and wife Win Butler and Regine Chassagne harmonizing and complementing each other in a whispering protest against the age of Neon Bible, in which religion is advertised and sold like a consumer product, and consumerism and materialism is becoming the new religion: “ Take the poison of your age / Don’t lick the fingers when you turn the page / It was wrong but you said it was right / In the future I will read at night.” The flashing neon signs are painting a bleak picture, and the religious doctrine will not bring salvation but eternal damnation: “Not much chance for survival / If the Neon Bible is true.”
A full-blown church organ powerfully opens Intervention, an unflinching attack on George W. Bush for waging a bloody crusade in which believers and patriots fight and die in the name of God. “You say it’s money that we need / As if we’re only mouths to feed / I know no matter what you say / There are some debts you’ll never pay.” I almost thought it was Billy Bragg when I heard this line: “Working for the church while your family dies / You take what they give you and you keep it inside.” “Working for the church while your life falls apart / Singing Hallelujah with fear in your heart.” But religious hypocrisy won’t last forever, “I can taste your fear / It’s gonna lift you up and take you out of here / And the bone shall never heal / I care not if you kneel.”
Black Wave/Bad Vibrations begins with Chassagne as a fugitive drifting in the ocean, running from some dark forces and memories that dogs her like music. Butler enters in the middle of the song and might be the music that follows Chassagne that seems to be warning her that the place she’s running to might not be the paradise she has envisioned.
Ocean of Noise switches again to quiet, somber mode. When communications get lost in the channel of noise, when the infectious violence outside is brought into interpersonal relationship, can we work it all out?
The Well and the Lighthouse tells La Fontaine’s fable of the Fox and the Wolf with a twisted modern day moral in which religion banks on selfish desire and paranoid fear. To get out of the well (hell?) you’d have to entice someone with an empty promise. Those in the lighthouse (heaven?) are resurrected, but “Can you see the funny side? The ships are gonna wreck.”
Antichrist Television Blues is a misleadingly fast-paced, chirpy song depicting a father’s prayer to God to realize his American Dream in the Post-9/11 era: he doesn’t want to work in a building downtown no more (“cause the planes keep crashing two by two”) and that he wants to see “the cities rust and the troublemakers riding on the back of the bus”. As “a good Christian man” and “a God fearing man” he goes on to beg God to make his little girl a star, so “the world can see who you really are”. At the same time he admonishes, “If my little mocking bird don’t sing then daddy won’t buy her no diamond ring”. As the song cheerfully proceeds the father gets more and more desperate: “Lord, would you send me a sign, cause I just gotta know if I’m wasting my time! //Oh my little mocking bird sing! Oh my little mocking bird sing! I need you to get up on that stage for me honey, and show the men it’s not about the money!” You can hear the nastiness as he screams “I’m through being cute, I’m through being nice, O tell me Lord am I the Antichrist!” when abruptly a chilling silence cuts him off.
Windowsill may be the weakest song lyrically and musically on Neon Bible, the poignancy is nevertheless touching. I can imagine the Texan born Butler, now Canadian expatriate, is probably added to that Traitor’s List by Rednecks of the US of A by now: “Don’t wanna fight in a holy war / Don’t want the salesmen knocking at my door /I don’t wanna live in America no more”.
No Cars Go is a great anthem for kids, or the kids in us. Butler and Chassagne sound perfect together. Somewhere between mom turning of the light and you falling asleep, there’s a magic place where no planes, no ships and no cars go. There’s something immensely moving about the simplicity and the hopefulness that brims in each “Hey!” and “Let’s go!” This is the most joyous and uplifting song in the whole album, which would seem like the perfect closure after so much disquietude and despair.
That’s why the bluesy, spiritual My Body Is A Cage almost feels like an anticlimax after the rapturous No Cars Go. Butler sings fragilely against a single drumbeat, “My body is a cage / That keeps me from dancing with the one that I love / But my mind holds the key.” Towards the end as he pleads accompanied by the organ, “Set my body free / Set my spirit free,” it’s a stark contrast to the escapism of the previous track, a heavy reminder of our adulthood. I’m beginning to realize that in an age “that calls darkness light”, No Car Go is the easy way out, the Hollywood happy ending, but that’s not what Arcade Fire is about.
Neon Bible is an uncompromising look at our corrupted society where the Religious Right controls people with fear and hypocrisy, the Bible dazzles like a tacky neon sign that beckons lost souls of the 21st century into a seedy brothel for their salvation.
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