Just imagine
Reflektor Part 2, except half the length of its predecessor and absolutely bursting with colour and energy this time around, and you’ll probably have a pretty good idea of what
Everything Now sounds like. While
Reflektor, and even
The Suburbs at times, were more subtle and subdued affairs for Arcade Fire,
Everything Now throws caution to the wind, taking all semblance of subtlety and restraint right along with it. The result is an album that again and again thrusts infectious melodic brilliance into the faces of its listeners with an urgency that has been missing in the band’s music for about a decade now; instead of masquerading it as a layered intellectual exercise as they did with
The Suburbs and
Reflektor, Arcade Fire have decided to call a spade a spade and release an unapologetic, bona fide pop album, and you can just tell that they’ve been itching to do it for their whole career. The melodic core of
Everything Now lies in its singles, and they’re all terrific; in particular, the 1-2-3 punch of the infectious “Everything Now”, the groovy “Signs of Life” and the massive “Creature Comfort” is as great of an opening to an album as Arcade Fire have ever crafted. “Creature Comfort”, especially, is one of the greatest songs of the band’s career thus far, with its pounding rhythm section giving way to biting, confident vocal performances from both Win Butler and Régine Chassagne; meanwhile, “Electric Blue” takes Chassagne into the limelight, her voice floating ethereally above lush, nostalgic synths and syncopated basslines. “Peter Pan”, “Good God Damn”, “Put Your Money on Me”, and “We Don’t Deserve Love”, are all wonderful songs, too, providing a subdued contrast to the energetic, larger-than-life singles while never leaving behind their melodic and colouristic invention. There are a few minutes in the middle of the album that are less than spectacular: “Chemistry”, with its insufferably cheesy music and vapid lyrics, is bound to create more than a few eye-rolls among listeners, and while the stylistic contrast between “Infinite Content” and “Infinite_Content” may be charming, the repetitiousness of the music and the lyrics’ corny play on words (
“Infinite content / Infinite content / We’re infinitely content”) are sure to grate on a few nerves despite the two tracks’ relatively short lengths. However, this weak mid-section only takes up about 7 minutes of
Everything Now’s runtime, and the other 40 minutes show Arcade Fire as they’ve always been – grandiose arrangements, infectious hooks and catchy grooves galore. Waves of colour and bursts of imagination fill this album to the brim even in its weaker moments, and the band sound all the better for it; Arcade Fire are as ambitious, over-the-top and endlessly clever as they’ve always been, and
Everything Now sees them growing to be just a little more confident and a little less apologetic about it.
