Review Summary: Stink Elephant
Can the power of love overcome allegations of sexual misconduct?
Bafflingly, this question is the closest thing that Arcade Fire’s seventh offering,
Pink Elephant, has to a thesis as it claws against its threadbare songwriting and tone deaf lyricism for any remaining inkling of charm that the group once had. This is, of course, due in large part to the bombshell article released after 2022’s
WE that, if nothing else, recontextualized frontman Win Butler’s ongoing decade-plus feud with smartphones as more frustration with his daily allotment of Tinder likes, rather than an earnest attempt at trying to navigate a technological landscape whose social implications far outpace our ability to understand them. While the band’s direction would have no doubt had to tackle this loss of goodwill* in some capacity, they split the difference in such a way that the ick is never fully addressed nor is it ever tucked away out of view.
*
In this case, it’s quite literal: Will Butler quietly exited the group and delivered an excellent 2023 album, Will Butler + Sister Squares that readers should check out immediately if they have not done so already.
One need not look further than lead single “Year of the Snake” for an examination at the curious equation at play. What begins as a dreamy meditation on change and flux and movement from Regine Chassagne quickly sours as Win butts in to deliver “I tried to be good/But I’m a real boy/My heart’s full of love/It’s not made out of wood” with the boyish charm that only a 45 year old man could muster. If the mere title “Circle of Trust” didn’t give you the heebie jeebies, its pulsing dialtone breakdown allows for enough time for eyes to break free from the chains of their sockets after hearing “Archangel Michael is blowing up your phone/He wants to know where you are/and when are you coming home?” “Stuck in My Head” comes closest to squaring the circle with a refrain of “clean up your heart”, but don’t expect much more than that simple command.
The surgeons preparing to perform Separate The Art From the Artist surgery can safely put down their scapals, however: your fight lies elsewhere.
Pink Elephant is gross, yes, but it’s also just plain bad. Of the album’s ten tracks, three are instrumental interludes that do little to sway or engage with the rest of the work (though their brief appearance on “Stuck in My Head” is nice enough to suggest a larger meaning that is ultimately absent) and the seven that remain are in desperate need for quality control. “Alien Nation” clearly wants to be refinement of the post-punk tinges on
Reflektor, but the song ultimately sputters before getting up to proper speed, completely hamstrung by Win’s wildly out of key vocals (“circle of trust” makes another appearance here for the most flatly unlistenable moment in Arcade Fire’s entire catalog). “Ride or Die” is an airy ballad that could potentially be touched up for a decent slow burn, but it plays out here like a voice memo that only occasionally stumbles into finding its footing. “I Love Her Shadow” is the lone highlight of the record, summoning just enough gumption from its lo-fi recession pop to sell its “we’re breaking into heaven tonight” refrain like a cutesy heist worth committing. Still, “I Love Her Shadow” wouldn’t have sniffed a place near the top of any other Arcade Fire record. It has some fun ideas, particularly in its playful electronic adornments, but it only stands out here from its willingness to briefly set aside the non-handling of context and have some fun with an actual progression.
It’s also one of only three songs here where members other than Win and Regine are credited, which suddenly slides the rest of the record’s shortcomings into focus. The flaccid, repetitive compositions are dull in comparison to the rest of Arcade Fire’s catalog (yes, even
WE) because this isn’t Arcade Fire at all. For all the many, many faults of the group’s post-
Suburbs offerings, there was still a sense of this collective trying their damndest to make some magic happen, and sometimes even succeeding. Forget
Funeral or
Neon Bible, throw on
Everything Now’s “Put Your Money on Me” or
Reflektor’s “Afterlife” and you’ll get these sprawling epics that sound teeming with energy and life and, cheesy as it sounds,
love. Even those album’s lesser cuts are at least a gloriously stupid mess. None of those Arcade Fire qualities are here, because this is not Arcade Fire: it’s Misato standing in front of Shinji saying “he would like to have a redemption album.”
Pink Elephant isn’t jumping the shark, so much as it is a formal DOD. Arcade Fire used to burn bright, but a fire can’t survive when all the oxygen has been sucked out of the room.
