Arcade Fire. Formal wear or costumes only please.

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I listened to Funeral on my way to work this morning. Not really summer music, but it's such a small miracle of an album that I'll always love Arcade Fire for it.

I'm glad my tickets for their show here came with free copies of the CD. I might not have bought the new album otherwise.
 
There is a shimmer of hope with the Lanois touched tracks 11-12. I hope these make an appearance sometime during the tour.
There is a huge hole in the middle of the album. I can sort of deal with Peter Pan, but after that I need to skip all the way to Electric Blue.
 
I didn't like Everything Now and Signs of Life so the album doesn't start off well for me. Creature Comfort is pretty good but then we get the awful one-two punch Peter Pan-Chemistry. This must be the low-point of their career, hopefully at least. Can't believe what they were thinking.

The two Infinite Contents are good but forgettable. They'd be fine as interludes on a decent album. Electric Blue is a highlight and the following three tracks, especially Good God Damn and We Don't Deserve Love, have potential. I love Win's yearning vocal performance in the chorus of the former.

So yeah, I'd give the album a 5.
 
The last few songs are pretty darned good. I like the album well enough, I don't mind the dancey stuff and the concerts are fun, but I miss how great they were with those first few albums.
 
I wish I had a better connection at the Red Lobster I'm at. I want to read the pitchfork review while eating cheese biscuits.
 
I'm waiting for the CD to arrive from my ticket purchase to hear the whole thing. But this one is shaping up to be a split in terms of fan reception, huh?
 
This sucks even more than the Gorillaz album, which at least had Ascension and Andromeda on it.

As far as indie stalwarts go, at least we've got LCD Soundsystem, The National and Grizzly Bear on the way. BSS and Fleet Foxes did their thing.
 
This sucks even more than the Gorillaz album, which at least had Ascension and Andromeda on it.

As far as indie stalwarts go, at least we've got LCD Soundsystem, The National and Grizzly Bear on the way. BSS and Fleet Foxes did their thing.



Annie!
 
Haven't heard the album yet but my expectations are so low thanks to this thread that I'm actually excited to listen to it. Pitchfork sucks so their review means nothing to me.
 
Signs of Life is fucking hilarious. Win has obviously disappeared so far up his own arse that he thinks he's doing this post-ironic cool thing, providing some sort of tremendous commentary on our hyper-connected world (when it's so far down on the list of the problems with the world), but the only ironic thing is that he keeps saying "looking for signs of life" when there are absolutely none anywhere on the album. Even the fucking song itself can't go a minute without shittily borrowing from LCD's Freak Out/Starry Eyes.

And it's funny how tracks like Rococo and Joan of Arc and stuff like that have always copped shit here, but they seem like incredibly good tracks now compared with the Peter Pan - Chemistry - Infinite Content stretch on this album.

My god, it's so bad. 5.6 is honestly really kind.
 
After first listen, this is pretty bad. I was actively laughing at how stupid and terrible Peter Pan and Chemistry sounded. The Infinite Content stuff was boring filler. Good God Damn pretty much covers the same ground as Creature Comfort without the decent groove and again, a laughable chorus. Like Cobbler said, Win is the real problem here. He seems to think he's being deep, but his lyrics just seem to come out of the first two words in his head that rhymed, then something about society. Completely tone-deaf.

Electric Blue, Put Your Money On Me and We Don't Deserve Love are the only things that save this album. The latter is especially strong, actually giving me that same lift and feeling as other great Arcade Fire tracks. (Seriously, what is it with them and the second-to-last song? They always knock that track out of the park.)

Also, the string version of Everything Now that closes the record is nice, but I liked it better when it was called "The Suburbs (Continued)."
 
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I wonder if they enjoyed the dance elements on Reflektor so much they tried to do it again, but without James Murphy to produce it completely lacks any groove and so just comes off as flaccid drivel. And lyrically, it's atocious. I mean, what the absolute fuck is this?!

"Assisted suicide
She dreams about dying all the time
She told me she came so close
Filled up the bathtub and put on our first record"


Only saving graces for me are Put Your Money on Me and We Don't Deserve Love. The former actually has a pulse and the latter has a gorgeous chiming instrumental around the chorus that really tugs on the heartstrings. And Win and Regine both going for it. Reminds me of Los Campesinos. Of course, they're not playing either of these songs live.

Everything Now is catchy as hell, and a good song, but it benefits from being good in comparison to the rest of the album. I think the love for Electric Blue is benefitting from the same. It's a good song but you put that on any of their other albums and it gets completely washed out. Not surprising it's getting paired with Sprawl II live, feels like they just tried to recapture that song.
 
I enjoyed it on first listen. With that said it will probably be my least favorite of theirs but it's not horrible. The title track though is one of my all time favorites of theirs.
 
This isn't anywhere close to as bad as LM and Cobbler are claiming IMO. The only complete dud is Chemistry, and it suffers from a lack of cohesion despite the clear efforts to make it instrumentally harmonious. That said, it's not a complete disaster by any means.
 
Arcade Fire has been my favourite band over the last 10 years. I've seen them 11 times and each of those concerts rank right up there with some of the best I've ever seen. But the reviews have scared me off from buying this album. I'm not paying for it until I know at least somewhat decent, and I don't have a Spotify or Apple Music account.

Part of it is fear that I'll dislike it so much it'll sour me on the band. It's already difficult being a fan of a band that includes Win Butler, who is as obnoxious as they come. I've been loyal until this current album cycle, where the marketing and the singles I've heard have totally lost me.
 
:sad:

Sorry BoMac. It sucks to be that into a band and have them do something that just fails miserably. I've never legitimately felt that with U2, but it's happened to me with other artists.
 
And lyrically, it's atrocious.

It really is. Infinite Content is an insult to their masterful, emotive work on Funeral and more, specifically, the socially-conscious tracks on The Suburbs that weren't egregiously obvious enough to whisper "we're infinitely content" into the void before playing a sample of a family buying groceries. That isn't just low-hanging fruit; Win ran up and stole a couple rotten apples off the ground with that one.

Then there's this awful ZZ Top verse:

I got the money, and I got the time
I got a secret, gonna make you mine
I can feel you making eyes at me
Baby you can try, but you can't deny
Chemistry


And more cringy finger-wagging from Win:

Those cool kids
Stuck in the past
Apartments of cigarette ash
Wait outside until it begins
Won't be the first ones in
Spend your life waiting in line
You find it hard to define
But you do it every time
Then you do it again


I can't even describe this awful shit:

Be my Wendy, I'll be your Peter Pan
Come on baby, take my hand
We can walk if we don't feel like flying
We can live, I don't feel like dying
Be my Wendy, I'll be your Peter Pan
Come on baby, you've got no plans
Was it good? Got all the answers
Man these women keep blowing their kisses saying

In my dreams we're kissing
It wakes me up when you've gone missin'
Once so close, but we've grown apart
And all the sickness, starts in the heart
In my dreams you're dying
It wakes me up, and I can't stop crying
'Cause it's a date night, dead-eyed American dream
And it leaves you baby if you let it leave


Even the "good song" has an eye-roller on it:

You don't want to talk
You don't want to touch
You don't even wanna watch TV
You say I can't see the forest for the trees
So burn it all down, and bring the ashes to me


It's like 47 minutes of preaching and dad jokes. Even the lyrics that aren't outright bad, like most of Electric Blue, have really obvious me/sea, true/blue rhymes that sound like they were written in 5 minutes. Did Chris Martin stop by the studio?
 
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Arcade Fire has been my favourite band over the last 10 years. I've seen them 11 times and each of those concerts rank right up there with some of the best I've ever seen. But the reviews have scared me off from buying this album. I'm not paying for it until I know at least somewhat decent, and I don't have a Spotify or Apple Music account.

Part of it is fear that I'll dislike it so much it'll sour me on the band. It's already difficult being a fan of a band that includes Win Butler, who is as obnoxious as they come. I've been loyal until this current album cycle, where the marketing and the singles I've heard have totally lost me.

I don't know if my opinion means anything to you or not, nor should it really, but this is not an album that is going to destroy your faith in the band or anything like that. The worst parts are over quickly, some of them in under two minutes, and those parts are surrounded by some solid tracks. Almost like it should have been an EP.
 
It's like 47 minutes of preaching and dad jokes. Even the lyrics that aren't outright bad, like most of Electric Blue, have really obvious me/sea, true/blue rhymes that sound like they were written in 5 minutes. Did Chris Martin stop by the studio?

I feel like I've said this a thousand times and no one ever responds to it, but this band has been preachy as hell for as long as they have existed. No one remarks upon it at all on The Suburbs for whatever reason, but it's nearly insufferable in places there. This is a really strange time to all of sudden be pissed about their lyrical content.
 
Well actually yeah we did remark on it with The Suburbs, a good number of people had a problem with the preachiness in Rococo when it was released, and I just mentioned it again last week.

I mean I'm gonna check this out at some point because I'm not just going to take the consensus as fact. But my expectations are very low.
 
I feel like I've said this a thousand times and no one ever responds to it, but this band has been preachy as hell for as long as they have existed. No one remarks upon it at all on The Suburbs for whatever reason, but it's nearly insufferable in places there. This is a really strange time to all of sudden be pissed about their lyrical content.

The heavy-handed social commentary started with Neon Bible and Windowsill back in 2007. There was a kind of moral hysteria driving many of the tracks, but they got away with it because they were dialed into their sound at the time. Suburbs was their preachiest to date, but people give the album a pass because those were some of their catchiest and most compact tracks.

With Everything Now they've crossed the line from preachy to incompetent and people are really starting to notice the glaring flaws in the lyrics.
 
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R.E.M. and Liz Phair in the early 2000s are examples that come to mind. And I was an immense fan of both.

At least R.E.M. recovered after 2 crap albums. Liz has taken longer but she has a collab with Ryan Adams that will hopefully be a return to form.
 
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