2008 Woodie Awards
Music Review
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible / Merge Records
Keane Ng
Issue date: 3/16/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment
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[Neon Bible] shoulders the weight of loftier expectations and bigger hype than any album should be expected to bear. As the follow-up to Arcade Fire's epochal 2004 debut, Funeral, an album that quickly found its way onto "best albums of the decade" and "albums that changed my life" lists alike, sold 500,000 copies, and turned the band into one of indie rock's best and brightest, [Neon Bible] has a lot to live up to.
The most amazing thing about [Neon Bible] might be that the band, bearing the weight of such expectations, has stayed true to their own unique vision. If [Funeral] was about young people finding life in the midst of death through the catharsis of love and music, [Neon Bible] finds those same people looking outward and trying, in the midst of post-millennial fear, paranoia and dread, to retain their own unique humanity. This is a more socially conscious Arcade Fire that had only been hinted at before. [Funeral] was universal in its themes and embracive in its idealism. That same idealism is echoed in [Neon Bible]'s optimistic moments, but is crowded in by an intangible dread of the forces that be in the contemporary world. "I can't breathe, I can't see / World War III when are you coming for me?" Win Butler asks, despairing and defiant, on "Windowsill."
[Neon Bible] might be hardest to swallow in that it really can only be consumed in one long sitting. This is an [album] album, not something you listen to when you're on the treadmill or elliptical machine to get your blood flowing. Taken individually, the majority of the songs might fall flat on listener's ears. Songs like "The Well and the Lighthouse" or "Antichrist Television Blues" start with the emotional urgency and theatricality that made [Funeral] so great in chunks and small doses, but don't have the same anthemic, fist-pumping emotional pay-off as their ancestors. Instead, these songs build momentum in sequence. Butler described the album as sounding like "listening to the ocean," and his description is apt. Songs slide and blend together, emotions and sounds ebb and flow like dark, churning water, a fog of reverb hanging overhead. The cryptic and stormy opener "Black Mirror" sets the tone for the album, a dense and atmospheric song full of ghostly background vocals and sharp, haunting strings. Butler cries, "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Show me where them bombs will fall," setting the stage for the album's dark and intriguing mix of the religious and the secular.
The most amazing thing about [Neon Bible] might be that the band, bearing the weight of such expectations, has stayed true to their own unique vision. If [Funeral] was about young people finding life in the midst of death through the catharsis of love and music, [Neon Bible] finds those same people looking outward and trying, in the midst of post-millennial fear, paranoia and dread, to retain their own unique humanity. This is a more socially conscious Arcade Fire that had only been hinted at before. [Funeral] was universal in its themes and embracive in its idealism. That same idealism is echoed in [Neon Bible]'s optimistic moments, but is crowded in by an intangible dread of the forces that be in the contemporary world. "I can't breathe, I can't see / World War III when are you coming for me?" Win Butler asks, despairing and defiant, on "Windowsill."
[Neon Bible] might be hardest to swallow in that it really can only be consumed in one long sitting. This is an [album] album, not something you listen to when you're on the treadmill or elliptical machine to get your blood flowing. Taken individually, the majority of the songs might fall flat on listener's ears. Songs like "The Well and the Lighthouse" or "Antichrist Television Blues" start with the emotional urgency and theatricality that made [Funeral] so great in chunks and small doses, but don't have the same anthemic, fist-pumping emotional pay-off as their ancestors. Instead, these songs build momentum in sequence. Butler described the album as sounding like "listening to the ocean," and his description is apt. Songs slide and blend together, emotions and sounds ebb and flow like dark, churning water, a fog of reverb hanging overhead. The cryptic and stormy opener "Black Mirror" sets the tone for the album, a dense and atmospheric song full of ghostly background vocals and sharp, haunting strings. Butler cries, "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Show me where them bombs will fall," setting the stage for the album's dark and intriguing mix of the religious and the secular.
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