#11 Arcade Fire – Neon Bible

Burdened with the nigh-impossible task of following up one of the decade’s hands-down best albums back in ‘04 with Funeral, Montreal’s Arcade Fire were facing a welcome, but tough, crowd when they announced the release of their sophomore effort Neon Bible early last year. Without the usual cushion most bands have of lesser-known underachievements to precede their great works – for example, it’s an easy guess Black Reble Motorcycle Club’s Baby 81 wasn’t going to be another Howl, if you’d just look at their first two biker-rock records – Arcade Fire had no context for their work besides an overshadowed EP. Old news by now, Neon Bible was hardly the dreaded flop it might have been and only encouraged the band’s surrounding myth as the “saviors of rock.” But you know me, I’m hard to win over, and while I couldn’t help but be lured by the anxious rise and fall of opener “Black Mirror,” monophonic jangle of “Keep The Car Running” and last-gasp rebuke of “Intervention,” I couldn’t help but feel the lack. Far from the mournful ballads of Funeral that acted as a circle-of-friends catharsis – shortly before entering the studio, the band suffered three family deaths back-to-back – Neon Bible was noticebly … angry. Sharing a title with the John Kennedy Tool (of Confederacy of Dunces fame) novel of the same name – though the band claims it as pure coincidence, uh huh, sure – Arcade Fire seemed to be playing into a well-rehearsed cliché of the whole denounce-the-dictator album – Ted Leo’s Shake The Sheets, Neil Young’s Living With War, Green Day’s American Idiot (though I’ve never heard it, and glad for it) – that had been freely circulating for two presidential terms now. That aside, though, frontman Win Butler’s vocals seemed to take on a melodramatic tone (I still cringe at the opening moments of “My Body Is A Cage”) that hadn’t been there before, a peculiar shift from the choir calls on Funeral that seemed to merge with the ebb and flow of the music so seamlessly. As I let my expectations fall away, though, and let Neon Bible stand on its own merit, Butler’s haunted angst on “(Antichrist Television Blues)” followed by his heart-rending resignation on “Windowsill” when he declares bluntly, “I don’t want to live in America no more,” floored me with each listen. Far from the cheap sandbagging of Green Day or another sappy call for peace from U2, Arcade Fire tapped into a shared vein of looming fear that dominates American sentiment, brought on by misuse of power by way of imperialistic Christian dogma. It’s only a matter of time before WWIII hits our shores and the possibility of a future administration waging a holy war on our own soil seems more likely than ever; it’s not that it absolutely will happen, but the threat is enough to lock your windows, let your patriotism wane and run like hell.