Neon Bible : Arcade Fire : Review : Rolling Stone

The key to all that is right, weird and nobly flawed about Arcade Fire's second album is in the next-to-last song, "No Cars Go." Written by the Montreal band's founding singers, Win Butler and his wife, Regine Chassagne, "No Cars Go" -- a teens-on-the-lam anthem about starting a new Eden, out where there are no roads -- first appeared on Arcade Fire, a self-released 2003 EP. On that record, the song was a midtempo run wrapped in what sounded like a couple of old accordions the group found gathering dust in an abandoned wilderness cabin.

The version on Neon Bible shows the difference a bigger production budget and a quantum leap in fear, everywhere you turn, can make. The basics remain: the simple, infectious melody; the singing-telegram lyrics ("Us kids know/ No cars go. . . . Hey!"). But the song now takes off like an army of Harleys on a dirt track (drummer Jeremy Gara's accents jolt the rhythm like potholes), and the arrangement is atomic melodrama -- strings, brass and refugee-choir vocals ringing in Grand Canyon-like echo. Like almost everything on Neon Bible, the follow-up to Arcade Fire's 2004 full-length debut, Funeral, "No Cars Go" is excess with a point: We are drowning in the unspeakable and running out of air and fight. If only everything else on Neon Bible made that point with the same dynamic overkill.

It's strange enough that Arcade Fire chose to cover themselves after just two records. It's stranger still that such a big band -- now seven members, playing a symphony's worth of instruments among them -- can sound so distant here so often. The reverb on Funeral was distinct but restrained, coating Arcade Fire's rousing, Balkan-dance-band jump in an early-Eighties New Wave atmosphere that perfectly suited Butler's neo-operatic tenor. If Echo and the Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch is looking for a long-lost twin brother, he can start looking in Quebec.

But on Neon Bible, the reverb is so big and black that the beat becomes boom and the orchestral garnish, arranged by Chassagne and Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett, gets pressed to the margins. The result is a huge sound that only sparkles on the edges, leaving Butler alone in the middle, railing against rising tides, falling bombs and the nonstop rain of shit on television like he's singing from the pulpit of an empty cathedral.

Maybe that was the idea. Neon Bible is an aggressively gothic record, explicitly so in the pipe organ that soars over the hunger and wreckage in "Intervention." More intriguing are "Black Mirror" and "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations," which somehow combine the oppressive dread on Side Two of David Bowie's Low with the church-bells-in-the-rain reveille of U2's Boy. "Neon Bible" is even bleaker, a soft two-minute eulogy for a generation blinded by chain-store signs and laptop-computer glow. "A vial of hope and a vial of pain/In the light, they both looked the same," Butler sings through whispering cellos and child-angel harmonies, like Leonard Cohen wandering through the third Velvet Underground album.

But there is determined resistance here too, a twisted faith in escape that comes through best when Arcade Fire hit the gas pedal. "Keep the Car Running" is a gripping chase scene -- Butler on the run from some kind of gestapo -- with crisply strummed mandolins and a racing pulse. Even better is the wordy delirium of "(Anti- christ Television Blues)." The reverb does the lyrics no favors, obscuring big chunks of the thirteen verses. But at the end of this torrent of 9/11 trauma ("The planes keep crashing, always two by two") and blasphemous prayer (a minimum-wage-slave dad asks God to make his daughter a TV star), an avenging spirit cuts through -- "I'm through being cute," Butler snaps, "I'm through being nice" -- that runs deep in Neon Bible. It's too bad you can't always hear it.

DAVID FRICKE
(RS 1021 - March 8, 2007)

(Posted: Feb 20, 2007)

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Give us your review of Neon Bible

Review 1 of 31

5of 5 Stars

I don't think this album would change the way people think, I don't think this album would change the course of pop music and I don't think David Fricke has a clue on how good this album is.

It may take a while to actually get into all the songs but "No Cars Go","Intervention" and "Keep The Car Running" are definitely great songs, from the first listen to my 50th listen to this album.
The rest comes together soon.

Feb 23, 2008 15:18:35

Review 2 of 31

5of 5 Stars

Sorry M.I.A., Mr. Sprinsteen, and Jay-Z, this album IS the best release of the year. It's like some long-lost Echo and the Bunnymen masterpiece, but with a richer, fuller sound than even those brilliant tunesmith's created. This album is a keeper.

Jan 3, 2008 07:26:18

Review 3 of 31

2of 5 Stars

I'm sorry to say, I don't see the attraction in any of these songs besides Keep the Car Running and No Cars Go, and even those, to me, aren't as good as a lot of other bands out there. Their last album was a lot better.

Dec 26, 2007 13:39:33

Review 4 of 31

3of 5 Stars

This band have to be the most overrated band in the world ever. This is a very disappointing second album. One truly great song, 'No Cars Go', and all teh rest is unmemorable filler. Unlike their 'Funeral' album, where they were fresh and original, this album is full of Bruce Springsteen rip offs. Never before did a band get so much undeserved recognition.

Aug 14, 2007 07:14:56

Review 5 of 31

5of 5 Stars

This is a truly extraordinary album. It might be the best, most moving and inspiring record I've heard in 30 years. 2007 is turning into a renaissance year, with this album (to my ear) flying with but mostly above the amazing new Shins and Wilco records. Damn, we've slogged through too many Killers and Franz Ferdinands and Keanes to get to this. Nothing against Fricke -- his review is thoughtful, but it's focused on peripheral details of the sound, and seems inexplicably closed off to the passion and insight that drive this sucker from start to finish. It's like reviewing "Born to Run" and complaining about the overdubs. To get a strong alternate sense of where we're at with Arcade Fire and Neon Bible, take a look at this piece in Slate -- http://www.slate.com/id/2161645/

May 28, 2007 17:07:49

Review 6 of 31

5of 5 Stars

I love Arcade Fire, have since they started. This album far out does Funeral which was brilliant. Song by Song it flows smoothly and shows more of the amazing creative side of this band. I buy a lot of albums a year, this is by far one of the best I have bought in a LONG time.

May 15, 2007 07:37:35

Review 7 of 31

4of 5 Stars

Am I the only one that hears the obvious Bruce Springsteen influence? I've read several reviews but no one has said anything about the similarites.

May 13, 2007 20:29:34

Review 8 of 31

5of 5 Stars

One of the best album I heard in the last months and one of the few new bands that make something original . Difficult to choose a poor song , some of them are really jewells like Ocean of noise , Intervention , Windowstill , No Cars go ,etc. So , I am completely disagree with RS . Regards from Barcelona.

Apr 29, 2007 15:17:12

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