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58. Everything Now - Arcade Fire (2017)

Alternative

While Everything Now finds Arcade Fire at their most accessible, it definitely doesn’t do so at the expense of their typical bleak and heavy sensibilities. Here, the outlook for the future is as cynical as ever and topics like the deterioration of interpersonal interaction, technology-induced sensory overload and suicide are explored at length and in great detail. And yet, there is an airiness and wide open feeling about the album that makes such material a little easier to swallow than its been in the past.

Effectively harnessing an eclectic range of sounds and subject matter and distilling them into a decidedly dancy product is no small feat. Most evident on “Creature Comfort”, frontman Win Butler relates a story of a fan that contemplated suicide with an early Arcade Fire record as the soundtrack. And yet, the cheerful melody pulls significantly on the punch of her wish to “just make it painless”. Leonard Cohen’s spirit is all over “Put Your Money On Me”, a plea for companionship emphasized by an angelic composition of synths and strings and backed by a choir. While signs of optimism are tough to find, they are there, especially at the conclusion of “Good God Damn”, with Butler’s realization “maybe there’s a good god, if he made you”. While sticking to their trademark tragedy-tinged formula, Arcade Fire have managed to evoke the same emotions you come to expect from their albums, all while creating a distinctly novel sound.

*image; cover art for the album Everything Now by the artist Arcade Fire