ARCADE FIRE

DYSTOPIAN DREAMS

Arcade Fire explore digital dysfunction, electronic grooves, and finds some rock and roll heart on Reflektor

by Matt Ashare |  
Published October 30, 2013

It’s tempting — so very tempting — to make grand pronouncements about “Reflektor,” the curious new album by the Montreal-based band Arcade Fire. After all, it’s been just two-and-a-half years since the unconventional seven-member group, led by Texas-bred singer-songwriter Win Butler and his multi-instrumentalist wife Régine Chassange. shocked the world, or at least that discrete yet still marginally significant demo who still care deeply about industry awards, by closing out the 2011 Grammy broadcast with a chaotic rendition of “Ready to Start.” What made that exuberant appearance so surprising and, for some of us, refreshing is that they’d just learned “The Suburbs,” an outlier among “Album of the Year” nominees, had beaten out a solid slate of better-known, heavyweight “mainstream” competition, including Eminem’s “Recovery,” Lady Antebelum’s “Need You Now,” Lady Gaga’s “The Fame Monster,” and Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.”

         While Arcade’s Fire’s conquest was undoubtedly seen by some as an aberration or even a minor travesty — I’m guessing that Eminem wasn’t terribly psyched, and that Gaga, Perry and the Lady Antebellum folks were pretty disappointed — it was hailed by many as a watershed moment. The National Academy of Arts and Sciences, a relatively conservative pillar of the music industry, had overlooked the usual mainstream suspects and anointed a non-conforming, artistically inclined, underground band with the Grammy’s most prized and highly coveted award. Surely, the game had changed. It was the ultimate triumph of the scrappy underdog in the face of commercial pop, a vindication of the anti-corporate values of the indie-rock underground, and, well, you get the point.

In fairness, it was also unprecedented: “The Suburbs,” released in the US on the homespun North Carolina label Merge, was technically the first album on an indie label to win top honors at the Grammys. And, in many ways, most of which had little to do with Arcade Fire or the album itself, it was also the logical outcome of more than two decades of demographic fragmentation, cultural alternafication, and wholesale erosion of power among centralizing forces like major labels and MTV.

So, how have Win Butler and his Arcade Fire crew, which along with his wife includes his brother William, as well as Richard Reed Perry, Tim Kingsbury, Sarah Neufeld, and Jeremy Gara (they’re all basically multi-instrumentalists), reacted to their newfound status as iconoclastic icons? More specifically, have they embraced the opportunity compete commercially on the international stage with the pop-savvy likes of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, or are they sticking to their proverbial guns as insurgent indie-rockers, turning a deaf ear to the alluring siren songs of fame and celebrity?

         If “Reflektor” is the answer, then it suggests that the question itself is flawed, because the outdated concept that artistic integrity and commercial success exist on two distinct and mutually exclusive planes has largely crumbled. Indeed, the lead up to the release this week of “Relektor,” the band’s fourth studio album on Merge since 2004, has been remarkable in its use of both traditional and “underground” promotional strategies. Beginning in August, the band initiated a surreptitious guerilla marketing campaign involved graffiti-style geometric logos bearing the album’s title — a campaign that received some unwanted notice when property owners began to complain about the unsolicited advertisements. And then, last month, Arcade Fire were the musical guests on the Tina Fey-hosted season premiere of “Saturday Night Live,” after which they starred in their own half-hour NBC special, which featured appearances by Ben Stiller, James Franco, Zack Galifianakis, and Bono.

         So, Arcade Fire haven’t been afraid to feed the hype machine. But, as the title track and opening cut on the two-disc “Reflektor” makes resoundingly clear, they’re also not succumbing to any pressures, real or imagined, to moderate their quirkiness or conform to the expectations of a larger fan base. Clocking in at seven-plus minutes, the track takes shape around a muted electronic groove that splits the difference between stylized club-kid funk and playfully sleek new-wave nostalgia, with icy synths tracing a skeletal melody, and edgy Butler trading verses with a more composed Chassange, who sings in French.

In a sense, it does feel like a major departure from the guitar-driven approach of some of the better-known singles from “The Suburbs.” But vintage synths have always been part of the Arcade Fire arsenal, and even “The Suburbs” had a few keyboard-heavy dream-pop respites. The difference here is the presence of producer James Murphy, the programming wiz behind LCD Soundsystem. A deft remix master, Murphy manages to keep the title cut percolating pleasantly for its nearly eight minute duration as Butler contemplates the emotional toll of being plugged into the digital world. “The signals we send are deflected again,” he sings muses, “We’re so connected, but are we even friends/We fell in love when I was nineteen/And now we’re staring at a screen.”

While there are hints of Talking Heads’ mid-’90s excursions into Afro-funk here, Butler’s ghost-in-the-machine affect and the song’s digitized dystopian overtones mostly brings to mind the alienation Radiohead began to explore in the mid-’90s on “The Bends” and “OK Computer.” And Radiohead provide a pretty good model for where a band like Arcade Fire — a musically ambitious band with one foot on either side of the hypothetic divide between the underground and the mainstream — appear to be headed with “Reflektor,” an album that challenges the listener incrementally, yet still offers plenty of the familiar. The disc’s second track, “We Exist,” for example, may have synth bass and a few glitchy electronic touches, but it’s a fairly straightforward, even anthemic, song that wouldn’t have been entirely out of place in an Arcade Fire set circa 2001. And, with it’s central guitar riff, incessant piano refrain, and coolly delivered dissection of social norms, “Normal Person” would have also been right at home in the sonic landscape “The Suburbs.”

 Like “The Suburbs,” which was framed by Butler as something of a concept album about the futility of reconnecting with the people, places, and emotions of a teenage past, “Reflektor” is not without its intellectual baggage. Butler has gone on record to explain that much of the disc, which features a vocal cameo by concept album enthusiast David Bowie on the seductively brooding “Here Comes the Night Time,” as inspired by some combination of a trip he took to Haiti with Chassange, who’s of Haitian descent, the Marcel Camus’s 1959 film “Black Orpheus,” and Soren Kierkegaard’s essay “The Present Age.”

Which is all well and good, but you don’t have to be an ethnomusicologist, a French film buff, or a worldly philosophy to decipher what Butler’s getting at when, after asking “Do you like rock and roll music, cuz I don’t know if I do?” at the start of “Normal Person,” he goes one to wonder aloud, “Am I a normal person?/You know, I can’t tell if I’m a normal person, it’s true/I think I’m cool enough, but am I cool enough, am I cruel enough for you?” And, the churning guitars that drive the arena-ready chorus provide a fairly succinct answer to at least one of Butler’s questions: he may be torn, but at heart he’s still very much a believer in the power of rock and roll music.