REVIEW: Arcade Fire “WE” – nra.lv

The latest studio album of the Canadian indiroc band “Arcade Fire” is already predictably catching the top charts of different countries, which is not surprising, because Vina Butler & Co’s previous masterpiece “Everything Now” was released five years ago – the fans have grown.

“WE” was released under the auspices of Columbia Records by Vin Butler, a soloist, guitarist and manager of many other instruments, Regina Schassen, a keyboardist, and British producer Nigel Godrich. The recordings were made in New Orleans, El Paso and elsewhere, until the long process of writing music was distilled into a 40-minute epic. The album is divided into two parts: the first part “I” or “I” tells about fear and loneliness in the isolation of a pandemic, and the second part “We” or “we” is full of reunion.

The album was released with the announcement of the world concert tour.

It will start at the end of July with a concert in Montreal, after which the Canadians will move to the British Isles and Western Europe. The most suitable concert for our latitudes could be in Warsaw on October 1. Feista will be a special guest on the tour in the UK, and Beck will join the band on the North American stage with a nightly acoustic program. It should be reminded that after the release of the album “Everything Now” during the “Arcade Fire” world tour, he also visited the Green Stage of Mežaparks, which now seems quite incredible, but the band really crashed here in August 2018.

A little out of history. British music magazine NME’s debut album Funeral (2004) was named one of the best records of the year, with Pitchfork, Filter and others nominating it as Record of the Year. Arcade Fire played sold-out concerts at major stadiums and major festivals, and was selected as the warm-up association for the Irish supergroup U2. Funeral brought the band their first Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Rock Album, and the band was nominated for three Brit Awards for Best International, Best Album and International Debut of the Year. The Neon Bible, released in 2007, was just as tumultuous, and music critics described it as an indirock march, while celebrating the presence of baroque pop music as well as folk rock. The album was also nominated for a Grammy, the best alternative music album in its category. The third Arcade Fire masterpiece, The Suburbs (2010), earned the Grammy for Album of the Year, the Brit Awards for Best International Album, the Juno Awards for Album of the Year, and the Polaris Music Prize for Best Canadian Album. Subsequent studio entries “Reflektor” (2013) and the already mentioned “Everything Now” (2017) were less successful, but they still did not go unnoticed.

This sinking history is due to an indisputable fact: with the exception of the debut album, to which the industry has not yet responded, all the other Arcade Fire albums have been a solid American Top 3 value (mostly even No. 1), but WE “Took only the sixth place in this top and even the third in his native Canada. New arrivals or is the album relatively weak? Listen to yourself, Western music critics rate this work between three and four stars.

PAR. “WE” is interesting first of all from the point of view of the conceptual story, but when it comes to the musical section, the shade of “Arcade Fire” already sounded like an electropope in the previous album – it seemed almost a betrayal to many fans, but in the viewer’s opinion it complements the sound of the band, as seen, for example, in the album’s introductory song, Age Of Anxiety I. “The Lightning II” will sound very effective in the stadiums (according to Spotify, others think so – this song already has more than six million audiences), as well as the song “Unconditional II (Race And Religion)”. whose recording featured even a master like Peter Geibriel.

AGAINST. The first part of the album is quite depressing – although conceptually it was intended, it puts its gray mark on the whole work. Again, there are folk rock motifs, this time more than before, which are quite disturbing; various other unnecessary elements also appear; there are several simply uninteresting songs, etc. – in short, there is nothing really right here.

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