Arcade Fire
Everything Now

The issue isn’t simple. Let’s put it this way: would an album like Funeral always be well received because it's melancholic, with orchestrations, etcetera? While Everything Now is trash because it has cheerful melodies and danceable rhythms? Is this the criterion by which to judge an album?

Personally, the reviews of this work have really irritated me. They complain about a superficial album but are just as superficial themselves. Or they denounce supposedly bad music, messy, copied from the seventies and eighties. Someone say this album is "derivative" (horrible curse word), come on! As if every form of music—and art—didn't always derive from something that came before. As if Dante didn't derive from Virgil.

My personal opinion is that people target Arcade Fire because they are Arcade Fire and have to make big, epic, serious things inevitably. But, frankly, I never really liked The Suburbs and Reflektor was too scattered, even though it had some brilliant pieces.

Finally, a short album, fully accessible, bright and yet capable of dealing with grim or otherwise challenging themes. "But no, rock can't be sunny, you can't make people move their butts as well as please their ears. It's immoral." Then, if it were truly a bad album, I would understand.

It seems to me that Win Butler and his mates show the usual mastery in arrangements and above all continue, thirteen years later, to know how to move their compositions, providing that feeling of improvisation, instinctiveness, invigorating imperfection, even though everything is calibrated and thought out.

Actually, if I have to say it all, some songs positively surprised me, for the freshness with which they mix genres and sounds: one above all Chemistry, which starts reggae and ends rock like the Black Keys. Or the burst of Infinite Content, two impetuous minutes. Moreover, the two twin central tracks summarize in two minutes each all the rock and folk stylistic features of the band on one hand and in Suburbs on the other. As if to explain that those sounds are surpassed for them.

Criticizing this album upon first listen is very, very easy. In fact, in my opinion, many reviews were written in haste. But it grows immensely over time, and repeated listens only confirm the solidity of the compositions. Even the more frivolous moments, which seemed pointless when listened to isolated, like Electric Blue, find their dimension in the album’s flow. It’s a very organic album, functioning as a single entity.

Then the arrangements seem really valid and layered to me: seemingly simple, they are full of tasty details for the attentive listener. Robust bass notes, guitar games, electronic effects. A shining example is the title track, which recalls Abba only in sound, not in quality and complexity of arrangement.

Also, the repetition of choruses innumerable times is not a trivial choice and above all is carried out with awareness. There's a difference between being repetitive and being insistent. These songs are insistent pop, persistent, because evidently there is a communicative urgency. And then the repetition here is always subtly redeemed by almost imperceptible, but essential variations. It might seem to many purely a commercial sell-out choice: obviously, it’s an opinion and also depends a lot on how much credibility you want to attribute to this band. I recognize quite a bit in them and therefore believe in the fertility of such pop.

The last three tracks are among the most appreciated because they more closely recall the early Arcade Fire, but if we want, they are musically less interesting than the others, though not lacking in excellent solutions. They serve to confirm that the approach is authorial, intellectual, it isn't a sell-out like Coldplay’s, as has been read around. You’d have to be hard of hearing not to grasp all the quality differences in the arrangements between the two bands. In short, you can be pop in an intellectual way. In 2017, can we say that?

The final thematic choices are beautiful: God, money, and love. But even more interesting is the choice to talk about today’s youth in the first part of the album, with somewhat moralistic but also effective outputs (in Creature Comfort: «Saying God, make me famous / If You can't, just make it painless / Just make it painless), or the infinite possibilities of access to information that come with the internet and thus the need to have everything immediately. These don't seem like trivial themes to me. Kids who remain eternal Peter Pans, showing no signs of life. I haven’t analyzed every single phrase of the album, but even just assessing the thematic choices and choruses, it doesn’t seem to me to be a sly work.

How can this be commercial and grabby pop if it confronts young people with all their distortions? No, these are the same old Arcade Fire, dressed in glittering clothes, maybe to attract some attention, but ready then to display their usual consistency.