Arcade Fire's Evangelical Expansion

originally published March 28, 2007

It’s hard to avoid the obvious subject when discussing Neon Bible , the second album from Montreal’s Arcade Fire. For one thing, it’s called Neon Bible ; for another, it was recorded in a church, and the band spent a five-day residency at New York’s Judson Memorial Church in February, playing to (and even among) ecstatic crowds. So the obvious spin keeps cropping up in articles and reviews, such as this one from, well, Spin : “If Arcade Fire can add another chapter as inspirational as this, they’ll need to add a lot more pews.” The thing is, this is one of those cases where something is obvious because it’s true.

I caught Arcade Fire at an L.A. gig two years ago, during the tour for the band's debut Funeral , and it remains one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. In my experience, the event it most resembled was a service at a Pentecostal church: the same fervor in the performers, spreading through the congregation like a wave; the same yelps and singalongs prompted by what must be the Spirit; even a guy excoriating the audience for not being devout enough (i.e., a Superfan yelling all night about how we weren’t dancing enough, and how the crowd at an earlier show were “real fans”). If there had been any serpents present, I have no doubt they would have been taken up.

But every religion faces the same problem: the things done in its name. Just as one shouldn’t blame Jesus for, say, Rick Santorum or Jerry Falwell, one shouldn’t blame Arcade Fire for its more vocal proselytizers. When evangelism turns hateful (Federal Marriage Amendment) or merely annoying (“You’re not real fans!”), it’s easy to write off the whole faith along with the faithful. Take, for example, this excerpt from a February 2005 blog post by Flagpole ’s own Mike Barthel in which he referenced a conversation between two characters on "Gilmore Girls:"

“Cringy though it was, this exchange is a pretty good illustration of why the band in question rubs me the wrong way right now:

Rory: Do you like the Arcade Fire?

Lorelai: I don’t know, do I?

Rory: Yes, you do.

Hey! Maybe, no, she doesn’t!”

I don’t mean to single out Barthel, one of the best music critics around, for a two-year-old blog post, but that comment stuck with me for two years because it does seem pretty representative of a general negative reaction to Arcade Fire that’s based more on the evangelical fire of the group's fans than on the music itself. Granted, it’s always a little cringy when Rory or Lane start rattling off indie band names (c.f. Lane’s Art Brut soliloquy on the show a month or two back), but if the show's producers or writers or whomever want people to know they like Arcade Fire, what does that have to do with the band itself, or its music?

Cult of Musicality

Well, for one thing, nobody likes being told what to like (at least not so explicitly). And Arcade Fire is almost never introduced as “hey, here’s some band you might enjoy;” it’s always the real-world equivalent of Natalie Portman handing you a set of headphones to try and change your life, except instead of Natalie Portman, it’s some punctuation-challenged blogger or pasty music critic or Chris Martin (Arcade Fire is “the greatest band in history,” says Mr. Paltrow).

The modern smart person’s reaction to such apparent hyperbole is “nuh-uh.” When I finally saw Little Miss Sunshine after months of breathless hype, only to discover it was a middling quirky-family indie dramedy, my reaction was vitriolic scorn, aimed more at the movie’s proponents than the movie itself. A quick glance around the blogosphere reveals quite a few people having the same reaction to Arcade Fire - almost as many as are shouting its name from the rooftops. There’s not much of a middle ground.

And it’s not like the group is all that difficult to hate. For one thing, if the band were any more Canadian, it would be a "Kids in the Hall" sketch (we get it, you speak French and spell “favorite” with a U). Second of all, there’s band cofounder/ co-leader Régine Chassagne, the Tike to frontman/ husband Win Butler’s Spike, who onstage comes across as super-precious, the kind of person who’s always aware of the camera, even when there’s not one on her. (A recent New York Times Magazine profile confirms her Drama Club President status: “Meanwhile, Régine… will riff excitedly on an idea for a guitar solo (Let it hang between the breaths of the melody… like an - I don’t know - like an airplane… make it really fourth dimension!) and then, frustrated by her failures of metaphor, will rise onto her stockinged toes to dance the line of a lazy guitar lick that lingers behind a song’s principal melody and - body suspended, then tripping forward - catches it just at the end.”)

Then there’s the fact that Arcade Fire is the kind of band that gets anointed by elder statesmen like Davids Bowie and Byrne, the kind of band that gets profiled in the The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine in the first place: it is the Official Band of NPR, the indie-rock weirdoes safe enough for your parents, the White Knights With Guitars, the Makers of Real Music riding in to save us from the Timbalands and Neptunes who have turned the music world into a sterile computer-generated bleep-and-bloop-ridden wasteland (as if it were an either/ or proposition). Arcade Fire is the dream band of someone who thinks Rock Still Needs Saving, and if you think that premise is ridiculous, you might find the band a little ridiculous as well.

Scales of Sound

But listening to Neon Bible is almost enough to convince you that Rock does Need Saving, and Arcade Fire is the band to do it. Unlike Funeral , which sounded huge but dealt mainly with personal history and personal grief, Neon Bible is Bono-sized, tackling the Big Themes - War, Death, Life, Love, God, America - and tackling them head-on. The sound is accordingly larger as well; Funeral was the sound of people making more noise than the space around them could contain, which gave it a ramshackle power that Neon Bible lacks. Now the members of Arcade Fire has given themselves a bigger space, and the sound has expanded to fill - though not exceed - that vastness.

The new scale of sound does result in moments that couldn’t have happened on Funeral . Album opener “Black Mirror” is coal-mine music, an echoing, crescendoing swirl of noise that seems to emanate from stone, from caves and corridors, always around the corner, until the sawing strings come in at the 2/3 mark, and, all of a sudden, the song’s right in front of you.

Even more epic is “Intervention,” which, like most of the album, took me a while to appreciate. I first heard it two years ago in a subdued acoustic live version, and then again earlier this year in a tinny, trebly BBC radio rip of the album version. I dismissed it as pretty but inconsequential - that is, until I heard it rumbling from surround-sound car speakers, this great overtaking wave of pipe organ demolishing everything in its path. (This is definitely an album to listen to at maximum volume.)

That’s one of the trade-offs of the Internet era of music: the same medium that can make a band a success can also make it instantly overexposed, engendering a backlash before the lash has run its course. The urge to hear more and more can be immediately satisfied, but this ravenous demand for the new means you’re going to start digging deeper into the barrel too soon. I think it’s a small trade-off, one that doesn’t mitigate the many benefits of online distribution and promotion, but it’s a trade-off all the same.

Two songs on Neon Bible best illustrate the new super-sized Arcade Fire sound. The first is “Black Wave/ Bad Vibrations,” which sounds like listening to the Go-Gos from another room - just the lowest bass and the highest treble, no mid-range - and it’s completely ominous, like when a horror movie scores the tensest scene with some sunny '80s hit. When “Bad Vibrations” turns into “Black Wave,” it becomes the sonic equivalent of its title, a roiling, churning mass of bass and low-end guitar, the dying rumbles of a doomed vessel, while an angelic choir oohs and ahhs over the top. At first it sounds all wrong, like the levels are out of whack, but when you let the noise surround you, it starts to make sense.

“No Cars Go,” the climax of the album, has appeared before, in different versions, on Arcade Fire’s self-released 2003 EP, and as a 2004 iTunes single. The new version has been rerecorded (with a 60-piece Hungarian orchestra and military choir, no less), and it benefits greatly from the new, bigger sound. The 2004 version had the band’s signature kitchen-sink aesthetic, but it lacked the dynamics and passion of Funeral . The Neon Bible version, however, is a monster, swaggering and sleek and propulsive. The rough edges have been filed off, sure, but what sounded before like a half-hearted attempt at an anthem now sounds like a genuine anthem.

The expansiveness of sound actually works against “Antichrist Television Blues”- the title nods to Bob Dylan, but it could benefit from some of early Dylan’s scrappy single-mindedness. The layers of noise hang on the song like a blanket, keeping it in a lovely rut. Lyrically, though, “Antichrist” is the high point of Neon Bible , an examination of the mental state of World’s Creepiest Dad Joe Simpson, father of Ashlee and Jessica: “You know that I’m a God-fearing man / But I just gotta know if it’s part of your plan / To seat my daughters there by your right hand / I know that you’ll do what is right, Lord / For they are the lanterns and you are the light.” The song is one of the few moments on Neon Bible that hit the same note of odd, yet strangely familiar, specificity as the songs on Funeral .

Anthems of Inclusion

Elsewhere, Butler’s attempts at Big Theme Tackling let him down. “Windowsill” compares America to an abusive father - a decent enough, if juvenile, metaphor, until Butler takes the unnecessary step and spells it out: “I don’t want to live in America no more.” And then: “MTV, what have you done to me? / Save my soul, set me free.” Preaching to the choir is almost always immediately effective, but in the long run, it’s detrimental to the message. Unless, of course, this is another character-voice exercise like “Antichrist”(after all, Butler doesn’t actually live in America no more), in which case Butler gets extra points for subtlety, since nobody seems to be getting the joke.

The real joke is that, irony or not, Butler & Co. have found themselves in a position where some people actually care what they have to say about God, America, etc., and yet there’s nothing they can say that their music doesn’t say better. The chorus of “Windowsill” could be anything at all - nonsense syllables, the Gettysburg Address, “After the show it’s the afterparty / and after the party it’s the hotel lobby”- and the swell of the music, bitter and hopeful, wouldn’t be any less powerful. The message is in the music; the words are just something to sing along to, to give us something to do.

Because if there’s one thing Arcade Fire does better than any other band right now, it’s making listeners feel that they are part of something larger. Not in that turning-on-the-house-lights, “you guys are the fifth member of the band” kind of way, not in the Deadhead, following-Phish-around kind of way; more like the “for where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” kind of way. (Like I said, it’s hard to avoid the obvious.)

Arcade Fire has taken to playing “Wake Up,” the group's most anthemy anthem, in the middle of the audience at concerts, and the audience always sings along. But the song’s spotlight moment isn’t the exhortation “Children, wake up,” it’s the wordless chorus, and when the band reaches that point, hundreds of voices rise, drowning out the music, all shouting the same nothing. There’s a lantern, and there’s a light, but it’s hard to tell which is which.

Gardner Linn

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column. Interested in contributing? Contact music editor Chris Hassiotis with ideas at music@flagpole.com.