Arcade Fire broke through in 2007 with the CD ‘Neon Bible.’
Arcade Fire wants to lighten up. At least that’s how it has looked of late.
The arty-but-huge Montreal collective recently clowned around in Halloween-like bobbleheads on “Saturday Night Live,” offered winking surprise shows under a fake name and let it be known that they devoted key parts of their latest CD to kickass dance music.
It all sounds like a welcome corrective to their uber-serious past. The breakthrough CD by these critical darlings, 2007’s “Neon Bible,” belched up lumbering, maximalist music around a lyrical salute to dystopia. They followed that with 2010’s “Suburbs,” which worked like an old-fashioned concept album with inter-connected themes, multiple characters and instrumentation that said “epic,” with soaring strings, blowing woodwinds and pounding drums.
All the heavy lifting paid off, snagging Arcade Fire the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2010.
As advertised, key parts of the new “Reflektor” — which the band leaked on YouTube on Thursday ahead of its scheduled release date Tuesday — do hit the dance floor.
As club-ready as the new disc may be, it offers an elevated take on the form. Songs like the title track all too closely recall intellectual club sounds created by Talking Heads, Bowie and, most of all, Tom Tom Club in the ’80s. That last connection comes courtesy of the baby’s-breath vocals of second singer Rene Chassagne. Tellingly, much of the disc was produced by James Murphy, czar of New York’s smartest dance act, the late LCD Soundsystem.
‘Reflektor,’ by Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire’s new songs don’t just offer high IQ dance beats. They cross-reference dub funk in “Here Comes The Night,” Gary Glitter’s glam-rock in “Joan of Arc” and wild rockabilly in “You Already Know.”
Sounds like fun, right?
Unfortunately, looming over and around these zippy beats lurk dense strings, intransigent horns and soupy echo. Again, the group has adopted a more-is-more approach, hobbling the rhythm.
The defining vocals of Win Butler don’t offer any greater differentiation. He has a thin and milky whine. In funk terms, he makes Bowie sound like James Brown.
His itchiness still might work for the overall concept, which addresses dislocation. The lyrics draw on the Greek tale of star-crossed lovers, Orpheus and Eurydice. As a married couple, Butler and Chassagne have the chance to re-embody this myth — but the vague lyrics defeat them.
Even the project’s biggest conceit misfires. They’ve marketed it as a “double-album.” But the split in the discs seems arbitrary, and at 74 minutes, it’s no longer than a single CD, especially once you whack off the last six minutes, which amounts to one long synthetic gurgle. It’s an apt representation of a work that promises transcendence but ends nowhere.
jfarber@nydailynews.com
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