Review Summary: w/e
2017 was a bad year. With the benefit of hindsight, one would be forgiven for looking back on it with rose-tinted glasses given the general state of the world at the time of this writing, but don’t let your pining fool you. In the face of a reality star president and rising climate woes, the culture was begging for someone -anyone- to meet the moment with some level of dignity, and all failed. Katy Perry used illuminati symbols and a haircut to jettison her career off a cliff, the Falcons suffered one of the most embarrassing defeats in a championship game in the three decades I have been alive, and Arcade Fire post-ironically sold fidget spinners. That last point, dear reader, is the perfect “you’re probably wondering how we got here?” record scratch to illustrate how down-bad Post-Harambe culture had gotten. Depending on which lens you were angled on looking through, things were either having trouble adjusting to a new normal or were on the slow trudge toward death as they met their (il)logical endpoint. It was embarrassing either way.
2022 is… also a bad year. The climate crisis has only worsened, tensions in Europe have escalated to outright war, reproductive rights are depressingly on trial again. There’s as much going on the world now as there ever has, and it is in this climate that Arcade Fire have emerged after a nearly-five year slumber with their sixth effort,
WE. Instead of addressing any of these going ons, Arcade Fire have decided to reflekt back on their career and re-establish a base of operations in the hopes of proving that they have not lost their edge after going over it. Indeed, the album’s promotional material spoke of tackling the theme of coalescing the “I” and the “WE” in our age of technology, and that’s certainly…there, but the album’s title also serves a backdoor route to self-titling, insisting that the long spell of wondering what Arcade Fire
is is over. This album serves as both an apology and a promise.
On both of those fronts,
WE is a success. The songs here are a smattering of just about every style Arcade Fire have tackled in the past and (mostly) with some level of restraint, landing sonically somewhere between the Springsteen worship of
The Suburbs and dance anthems of
Reflektor. If there was any doubt that the band could shut up and play the hits, the deja-vu inducing pair of “The Lightning” should put that to rest as you wrap your head around where exactly it would fit on either of those albums in a different world.
Therein, however, lies the issue at the heart of Arcade Fire’s latest. The band has never sounded so nervous to do anything new or exciting. The aptly-titled “Age of Anxiety” is broken into two parts that both spend their runtimes threatening to become spellbinding dance numbers in the same way “Sprawl II” is, but both times end up settling on the routine and the obvious. There are half-shouts of “Yeah!” and some blips and bloops to try and illicit emotion, but they seem like pale imitations of the stratospheric shouts of the song they clearly want to remind you of.
“End of the Empire” is a quadrilogy that, on paper, should serve as the album’s centerpiece. It might be the most ambitious thing the band has ever done from a musical standpoint, incorporating everything from saxophones to Queen guitar licks to accordions in their most obvious attempt at aping Bowie to date. The end result, however, rings a bit hollow. Without even getting into the cringey lyrics about “Unsubscribing” -and, yes, there is even a dig at the reception to
Everything Now- the nine minute suite ends up sounding like a band struggling to conjure an anthem that used to come so easily. The closest Arcade Fire comes to doing just that are on “Unconditional”, whose first part is a refreshingly earnest diddy about the joys of making your way in the world and closing half is an honest-to-god banger of a dance track with a genuinely great -if all too brief- cameo from none other than Peter Gabriel.
It’s a genuine shame that those highs don’t happen often on the album because these cracks of light ultimately end up causing you to look back at the band’s catalog than look forward to what they could potentially do in the future.
WE is not an awful record, but it is a sad one. Hearing a band that used to swing for the fences on every track settling for a bunt would be a lot easier to swallow if it weren’t so obvious that they were doing so, not out of necessity, but because they are self-conscious about missing. I am sure that to someone out there,
WE will be someone’s favorite Arcade Fire record, and to them I ask, “have you heard anything else from them?”
w/e
