Reprising my cranky old tune?
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Is it just me, or does the new Arcade Fire . . . kinda suck? Neon Bible is definitely better than the dreadful new Stooges album or the merely boring new Shins album, but comes nowhere close to Funeral. I'm not one to complain simply when a band that has made a record that I liked changes their sound on a subsequent record. So I'm not disappointed in Neon Bible because it sounds less anthemic than Funeral or because it is more Mercury Revish piano-goth and more Springsteenesque (down to some blue-collar lyrics). The record also certainly doesn't lack passion; if anything, it emotes too much. I also like the church organs. Lyrics are generally better than on Funeral. I'm disappointed in Neon Bible because the song quality doesn't generally reach its predecessor's quality. For every excellent song there's a real clunker in the bunch. The overall impression is confusion and lack of focus. The remaining faults lie in arrangements. All too often the kinds of vocal phrasings that made songs like "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)" and "Rebellion (Lies)" so infectiously giddy shine with their absence. Often the band overcompensates for deficiencies with the bombast of adding yet another orchestral instrumental component - a musician's equivalent of throwing more plaster on a shaky wall to make it seem solid. Even one of the best tracks here, "No Cars Go" (it's telling that one of the best is re-recorded from 4 years ago), is ground down and suffocated in its last two minutes with this kind of overkill and, frankly, self-indulgence. It's also crucially bad for as epic a band as the Arcade Fire that the production, in trying to deal with the excess of instrumentative riches, is fatally muddy, stifled, and cramped. Overall not a bad record, but highly inconsistent. Let's hope it's just growing pains. Arcade Fire are definitely capable of better. Musical disappointment #3 of 2007.
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