Arcade Fire Loosen Up3 Out Of 5 Stars
Arcade Fire find themselves stirring up emotions and dance floor beats on their double CD, "Reflektor." As the most famous band of their beloved Indie scene, they have to contend with being the little band that could, as in could win a Grammy for Album of The Year ("The Suburbs"). Their answer? To invoke Orpheus and the failed love to Eurydice (she's the image of the cover art), bring in Haitian musicians to lay down some serious grooves, let David Bowie sing back up (the title track) and make what feels like their least densely produced album of their career. If anything, it frequently reminds me of how Talking Heads sounded when they used "Speaking In Tongues" to open up their overall sound.
"If there is no music in Heaven, then what's it for?" bemoans Win Butler on "Here Comes the Night Time" (the first part, the second opens disc two as a dirge), and he's here to celebrate. That means giving "Reflektor" over to James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem to make the grooves pop. Granted, this isn't Saturday Night Fever, but the percussion and bass drive better than half the album. Eurydice and Orpheus tangle again on twin songs "Awful Sound" and "It's Not Over" to again invoke their tragic love before moving onto other topics. Like "Porno." Not as bad as the title implies, it's a slower tune that contemplates the simplistic ways that men misinterpret love, like "little boys with their porno." Yes, Arcade Fire may be loosening up, but that doesn't mean their lyrics have gone soft.
Which is what makes "Reflektor" a pretty good album. Arcade Fire are still finding ways to get their sound to new places without losing their identity. If I have any gripes, it's that the expansive grooves seem to often come at the expense of over-lenghty songs (some judicious editing - like the 5 minutes of drivel at the end of "Supersymmetry" - could have made this a single disc), and the album packaging comes with lyric sheets that tore as soon as they got caught on the CD's. But that's hardly a fault to Arcade Fire. I'd gladly take a two CD set of music this ambitious than a single disc of poorly thought through laptop pop. So go ahead, dance to a song about dying (the New Order-ish "Afterlife") till "we work it out."
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