THE ARCADE FIRE
NEON BIBLE
MERGE
WORDS: AW HENDERSON//

The Arcade Fire take themselves way more seriously than I ever will. That's why we need them. No other band pursues their music with as much self-consuming passion. When you read that Win Butler cried the first time he heard the church organ that appears on Neon Bible, you believe it. That's how seriously these guys take themselves, and that's why no matter what they record, I will always enjoy it.

Scanning the track list makes it obvious that the intervening three years of success since their debut have done nothing to cheer the band up. "Black Mirror", "Black Waves/Bad Vibrations", "(Antichrist Television Blues)" and "My Body is a Cage" are for the most part just as dense and gloomy as they appear, but there are also plenty of moments where the storm clouds break and the sun shines through the stained-glass cathedral windows of the Arcade Fire's world. What separates Neon Bible from 2004's Funeral is that when the light breaks through, The Arcade Fire channel it directly into the corners of society that usually lie in shadow. Funeral was full of moments that felt like the band was just on the edge of bursting into solar-like fission, just about to transform themselves into the light that they somehow managed to divert into their songs. Here, the fist-pumping, life-and-youth-affirming "FUCK DEATH!" attitude is more often replaced with what almost feels like jaded spite, or at least bitterness. Whether or not the religious imagery throughout the album is meant to be taken literally, Win Butler is pissed off at someone.

Two of the album's most upbeat tracks, "Intervention", and "(Antichrist Television Blues)", act as Butler's fiercest attacks on...Christianity? I'm not sure, but it sounds great. "Working for the church while your family dies/ Your little baby sister's gonna lose her mind/ Every spark of friendship and love/ Will die without a home" he sings over screaming organ and militant angelic strings that offer the album's clearest reflection of Funeral's trademark pomp and adolescence. The record's highlight is "(Antichrist Television Blues)", a track that feels most relevant to the generation that's actually going to listen to this music. "Oh God, would you send me a child?/ 'Cause I wanna put it up on the TV screen/ So the world can see what your true word means" could be a gospel of basic cable America.

Bill Watterson once wrote a gag for a Calvin & Hobbes strip in which a T.V. set responds to the famous communist maxim about religion being the opiate of the masses with the thought: "Karl Marx hasn't seen anything yet." The real church these days isn't Catholic or Protestant, it's electronically broadcast to families all over the world. In this context, lines such as "MTV, what have you done to me/ Save my soul, set me free" aren't so cloying as others have accused. Neon Bible deals not with the death of close relations and personal innocence, but the death of a society that looks the other way while the fluorescent tubes that make up the Bible's pages wrap around our throats, strangling our capacity to love and create. You may not buy that, but Win Butler certainly does, and it will send goose bumps down your spine to hear him plead his case.