Arcade Fire – ‘Everything Now’
The media campaign and subsequent
rollout of Canadian rock group’s previous record ‘Reflektor’ is argued as being
nearly influential as the music itself. The band became The Reflektors, an on-stage persona in which the group would appear
at their shows wearing papier-mâché heads, a fake website was made, so was a
fake album and fans were ordered to dress in their shiniest at the band’s gigs.
This campaign by the group took the music world by storm and it reinvented the
way in which an album could be marketed, so much in fact that it could simply
never be done again, certainly not to the same degree of success. However, in preparation
for the release of new record ‘Everything Now’, the group have taken a similar,
but not trusted, marketing path. The group mocked a website up to look like
popular US music blog ‘Stereogum’ and reviewed their own album (weird I know)
seemingly attempting to second-guess the critical feedback they would receive for
this record. The review stated that the record would initially be dismissed as
an LCD-Soundsystem rip-off, but would “eventually be evaluated as one of the best
of the year”. The group also created their own company ‘Everything Now
Corporation’, a company that manufactures candy and fizzy drinks whilst simultaneously
marketing this new record via ice cream advertisements. Again, very weird I
know. This tiresome campaign prior to this album feels almost 20 years too old,
the ‘OK Computer’ era of utilising technology as a back-story to an album fit
right into the late 90’s technology boom, yet nowadays it feels more recycled
than revolutionary. Anyway, I was hoping that the music of this record would
speak for itself, and it wouldn’t be overshadowed by its extremely long
marketing campaign.
Despite being typically renowned as
an indie-rock band, Arcade Fire have always had this incredible knack on
previous records to seamlessly weave a variety of different sounds and textures
into their music to create an overall sound that is difficult to pin-down
accurately. However, on new record ‘Everything Now’, the bands seem bereft of
new and refreshing ideas. There are a number of lacklustre tracks on this
record that would not have been allowed on any other Arcade Fire record. The
majority of ‘Chemistry’ sounds like an disgustingly awful attempt at low-fi
reggae by an unpopular 80’s group, whilst the two tracks ‘Infinite Content’ and
‘Infinite_Content’ are pointless both in their overtly simple sound and the
manner in which they are split up into two separate songs when they could
easily be mashed together, albeit to create one awful song but still. However,
this is a record with varying levels of success. Despite its clear examples of
dire art rock, there are some genuinely brilliant tracks on ‘Everything Now’.
The electro-funk paired with the falsetto vocals of ‘Electric Blue’ are
refreshingly brilliant, the wonderful pop elements of ‘Creature Comfort’ are
great and the album’s titular track is a 5 minute wonder filled with everything
from layered vocals to panpipes.
In a musical world filled with the
clever political outcries of artists like Kendrick Lamar, Father John Misty and
Lana Del Rey, it is no surprise that Arcade Fire want to get in on the act. However,
on ‘Everything Now’ the points that the group are trying to put across are not
embedded secretly enough in their music. The points are wildly too opaque,
making ‘Everything Now’ a relatively easy album to work out as it were.
‘Everything Now’ is certainly not a
bad record, it’s just that when it is compared to the group’s sublime previous
work and when it is placed into the current musical stratosphere that it begins
to look old and worn-out. The styles of music are not fresh enough for 2017 and
despite the record’s occasional standout moments, they are overshadowed by some
of the poor tracks on this record.
Overall Rating- 5/10
Fave Tracks- ‘Everything Now’, ‘Creature Comfort’, ‘Put Your
Money On Me’, ‘Electric Blue’
Least Fave Tracks- ‘Chemistry’, ‘Infinite Content’, ‘Peter
Pan’
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