Arcade Fire – Reflektor
When Arcade Fire’s third Album ‘The Suburbs’ graced us with its presence I was a big fan of the direction Arcade Fire were taking, this commercially viable playlist of anthemic Rock/Pop tunes were a pathway to the spotlight and this gave Win Butler and his miss-matched crew a platform for which to make Reflektor the most anticipated album of theirs yet. But I had a feeling deep down that their OK Computer or Achtung Baby! moments were behind them, Neon Bible was a masterpiece, a benchmark to which all songwriters should look to if they wanted to push the boundaries of modern contemporary music and The Suburbs was a compelling album but didn’t give us as much of a journey for the listener as Neon Bible did.
And the early signs for Reflektor weren’t promising... The viral marketing campaign was facing legal issues, their debut performance on Saturday Night Live was sub-standard at best and the ‘special’ half an hour bonanza in which celebrities would turn up to say something witty while Arcade Fire are performing from the album was not what I had come to expect from a musically virtuosic group. But their first single and title track ‘Reflektor’ was released along with the video, an eight minute work of art that gave me that hive of anticipation that I wanted to grasp – It was finally here. The title track was filled with a plethora of influences, from LCD Soundsystem to Ziggy Stardust and wrapped neatly together to make you appreciate what they had given us. The vocal repetition suited the song and the crescendo/diminuendo style added a certain edge to it. It was the strongest hint to Arcade Fire’s progression into the musical unknown since ‘Une Annee sans Lumiere’ and ‘Keep the Car Running’.
James Murphy’s reputation had grown to a near unreachable height when he was given task to makes sense of Arcade Fire’s latest project. A perfect pairing between band and producer. James’ background and LCD’s exploits would make a mouth-watering choice for band who wanted to enter the world of Dance and Electronic Pop but still make sure they were not deserting their roots.
The end product was, to put it modestly, their Magnum Opus. I was wrong to assume it was going to be a near impossible job to reach the heights of ‘Neon Bible’ but they have managed not only to surpass the benchmark set, but veer off into the stratosphere with this masterstroke of an album. This 85 minute eclectic mix of Genre-shifting, forward thinking music is the most complex and ambitious piece of work since Talking Heads’ ‘Remain in Light’ and has the complete bombastic notion of having every musical influence under the sun stuffed inside it; ‘Supersymmetry’ has notes of Pink Floyd and Mgmt, ‘We Exist’ has Michael Jackson and Prince placed within its fabric, ‘Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)’has hints of The Beatles and Talk Talk and if you have a keen ear the album also consist of The Sex Pistols and Eric Clapton. This confusing, complex web of ideas and algorithms are deeply frustrating because it makes it extremely difficult to find a pattern, a message or... perhaps... symmetry, but it makes you take a step back and listen in awe as they challenge you to try and piece together this myriad of social and philosophical notions and plethora of disjointed structures.
Only time will tell how important this album will be compared to albums such as Nirvana’s Nevermind or Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ but with Reflektor, Arcade Fire have written themselves into the history books with a permanent marker and tied themselves to the touchstone of post 2000 classics and aren’t going let go.
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