Quote:
|
Originally Posted by noisereductions
I'm surprised Pfork gave it a bad review, but I'm not surprised it got bad reviews. I was keeping up with the singles released prior to the album and I hated them all.
|
It basically just sounds like Arcade Fire to me. Not very motivated Arcade Fire, but Arcade Fire nonetheless. I haven't listened to the whole thing, but it does seem like they're stuck in a funk. "Arcade Fire does ABBA" the headlines say, as though Arcade Fire hasn't been "doing ABBA" since "Mountains Beyond Mountains." Or perhaps, even since Funeral ("Haiti").
And then Relfektor, which was a good (great?) album, took the "dance" vibe to the next logical step, and pretty perfectly melded AF's arena-rock with disco and reggae. But this one (Everything Now) feels a bit like a tired re-tread of the ideas on Reflektor, without that album's rejuvenated, energetic feel. I was listening to tracks from Reflektor yesterday, and "Here Comes the Nigh Time" and "Porno" and "Supersymmetry" are some great freakin' songs, even if there are patchy parts here and there.
I just honestly think it's like this: AF has made a career out of intense anthems, and it's frankly a bit appalling to me that they kept doing more intense, bigger anthems album after album without losing all of their fan base in the process. So, now maybe they have an album that has all the grandstanding conceptual mumbo-jumbo of previous records, but goes a little easier on the hollering, triumphant and/or apocalyptic anthems and goes for a more subdued vibe without mixing it up musically enough to make up for the lack of pathos. I think it's a shock to the system to hear AF *not* belting songs to the back row, and trying to embrace ironic vocals and groove-laden tracks a bit more.
I don't think the album deserved the brutal beat down it received from Pitchfork (though again, I haven't listened to the whole thing), but I do think that the band has been coming increasingly close to plateauing in recent years, and they've overcome it with good songwriting and commercial success (The Suburbs) and a great artist-producer combination on Reflektor. But now, they've been doing the same basic thing for so goddamn long that they were bound to have a flop at some point.
That Win Butler is pretty full of his arse too.