Review of Neon Bible (Arcade Fire)

8.7 out of 10

If a band’s new album is to be judged against the album that preceded it, then Arcade Fire faced an almost impossible task when recording Neon Bible (released today). Neon Bible, the follow-up to 2004’s Funeral, was competing with an almost mythically high bar that was set when Win Butler and co. captured lightning in a bottle and electrified the indie world and critics everywhere with Funeral’s seemingly simultaneous understated and overstated opus on life, love, youth, death and coming of age.

Arcade Fire is more anthem than song. And this trend continues with Neon Bible, another coming of age story, but this time it’s a story set in the contradictions of today. The stories we see on TV and the explanations we hear from our elected officials. The final throes. Mission Accomplished. Terrorists quoting their bible and the good guys quoting theirs. The government restricting rights in the name of liberty.

This is a dark album. A concept album of fear and paranoia, against the backdrop of someone that can’t wrap his head around what he sees around him and how his instincts translate those events. The guilt of the father that works to earn money to put food on the table without questioning what his job accomplishes. The guilt of the fair person that gets on an airplane and fears the passenger in 3B because he looks different. The paradox of the God-fearing Christian that perishes on September 11. Did his God abandon him? Or not? And what are the implications?

The album opens with Black Mirror, a musically and lyrically dark Snow White-type fairy tale, where we close our eyes and see an evildoer (pick which one and which side) looking into his black mirror for guidance (“mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell me where the bombs will fall”). Images of security cameras capturing our every move. Names never spoken. Curses never broken.

Cut to the next and poppiest track on the album – Keep the Cars Running – a hard driving song with distorted electric guitar mimicking planes flying overhead in the protagonist’s dreams. This would be Back in the USSR if the stage hadn’t already been set. Keep the Car Running just in case we need to get out quick.

"Every night my dream’s the same
Same old city with a different name
Men are coming to take me away
I don’t know why but I know I can’t stay
Keep the Car Running"

The album continues in this fashion – musically and lyrically playing on themes of religion and paranoia and the average man’s struggles to internalize and rationalize them (“a vial of hope and a vial of pain, in the light they both look the same”). The music matches the mood – sounds of storm, sounds of chaos, sounds of dark alleys and empty streets. Win’s soaring vocals matched with Regine Chassagne’s haunting background moans. Eerie violins, powerful church organs, and piano notes that you haven’t heard since you were a kid and banged on the lower register notes of the keyboard.

If the album suffers from anything, it’s that it may be a bit too much. It’s a mood album similar to Radiohead’s OK Computer – the listener may be worn down after listening to this. There are no easy rockers on here and each song deserves undivided attention. That attention is rewarded with a carefully crafted and beautiful album, but it’s also an album that can be preachy. It’s not an album making the rounds in the Republican Party.

It’s unclear to me whether this dark story ends the way we desperately want it to by the end – with hope. Perhaps it’s more accurate to describe the final emotions of the protagonist as a steely determination to change himself and the world around him in the only ways he can (“My body is a cage, that keeps me from dancing with the one I love, though my mind holds the key”). The penultimate track on the album, No Cars Go, is a song of youthful rebellion – “us kids know” where “no cars go” and “no planes go.” And at the end of the song, the singer implores “Let’s Go!” It’s unclear where we are going, but it sounds like the protagonist knows something I don’t, and it’s clear that we’re in this together. If Arcade Fire is going there, then I am going too.