Arcade Fire WE Review: A Half-Convincing Return to Sweeping Seriousness

Economical hooks and ironic distance have been supplanted by a return to grandiose multi-part suites and painful sincerity.

Arcade Fire, We
Promo Photos 2022

On 2017’s Everything Now, Arcade Fire seemed to finally embrace the ridiculous, with a mix of jejune pontifications on internet culture and often histrionic indie rock. At least partially freed from the obligations of creating “serious” work, they shifted their focus to doing what, beneath all the window dressing, they do best: writing killer pop songs.

By contrast, the band’s long-gestating follow-up, WE, sounds just like another Arcade Fire album, with all the po-faced seriousness and sweeping sonic vistas that entails. Economical hooks and ironic distance have been supplanted by a return to grandiose multi-part suites and painful sincerity. (There’s a grand total of one couplet that could have appeared on Everything Now: “I unsubscribe/Fuck season five.”) It’s a purely reactionary effort, delivering the hallmarks of classic Arcade Fire in such tried-and-true fashion that it may just signal that the band, 20 years into its career, is transitioning to its nostalgia phase.

The melodies and arrangements here are as excellent as they are predictable, and the band recaptures their classic sound on “The Lightning I, II,” with a comfortingly familiar blend of wide-open-skies Springsteen/U2 bombast and pour-out-your-heart emotionalism. But at times, especially toward the beginning of the album, WE takes a more tentative approach.

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That could be, in part, chalked up to its conception during the pandemic, which forced Win Butler and Regine Chassagne to begin working on the songs by themselves before the full band could convene in person. There are fewer pan flutes and ecstatic stadium-chant backing vocals, and more whispers and delicate piano lines.

This more intimate approach is a boon when Arcade Fire fully commit to it, especially on the mostly acoustic title track. But a couple of the more elaborately arranged songs seem to be missing that extra verve that only a large ensemble playing at the same time can provide. “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)” weaves in electronic dance elements a la the songs on 2013’s Reflektor, but despite an expertly constructed call-and-response melody, it sounds thin and tepid compared to the plowing grooves on that album.

Perhaps faced with the realization that the world prefers him as a prophet rather than a satirist, Butler returns to the weighty societal themes of 2010’s The Suburbs and Reflektor but has nothing new to say about them. He laments the dulling effect of television and “little white pills,” and attempts to meld pseudo-profound mythological references with digs at modern life: “Born into the abyss/New phone, who’s this?,” a line that could have greatly benefitted from the winking delivery he might have given it on Everything Now.

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Butler has always sung about disillusionment and anxiety, but with a deeply felt exuberance and catharsis, but on WE, he just sounds fatigued. It may be that, having reached middle age—one of the main themes of the four-part “End of the Empire” suite—he’s more interested in being a husband and father than the voice of a generation.

When Butler and Chassagne sing about their family, the results are genuinely moving. Butler delivers the pep-talk platitudes of the breezily strummed “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)” with genuine joy. And while the woozy yet elegant “End of the Empire” is ostensibly about what Butler sees as the impending collapse of the U.S., it’s not until he calls out what he’s most afraid to lose (“Didn’t used to think I could ever dream/About losing you/But I do”) that the song’s outsized sense of drama start to feel real. “I wanna get well/I wanna get free/Would you wanna get off this ride with me?” he softly intones in a trembling voice on the title track, offering a disarmingly unguarded summation of where his head seems to be these days.

Score: 
 Label: Columbia  Release Date: May 6, 2022  Buy: Amazon

Jeremy Winograd

Jeremy Winograd studied music and writing at Bennington College, where he did his senior thesis on Drive-By Truckers. He has written for Rolling Stone and Time Out New York. He and his wife met on a White Stripes message board.

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