fine, i'll write the bad arcade fire review
Plus great tracks from the Smile, Belle and Sebastian, Kehlani, and more
I didn’t want to do it, but I guess I have to, since it seems like most music outlets really want this album to be good: the new Arcade Fire album is very bad.
If in their earlier years Arcade Fire routinely sounded like too many people crowded on a small stage shouting to be heard, they now sound tiny and adrift in a massive space, like they’re wandering in an abandoned model McMansion. Nigel Godrich’s dutiful production adorns these songs with a purposeful sense of open space, meaningful reverbs and moody pianos ringing out and accidentally highlighting the dearth of actual…ideas.
Lines that could be forgiven as clunky mid-verse throwaways - “I Unsubscribe!,” “Rabbithole!/Plastic Soul!,” “You Are My Race And Religion!” - end up taking center stage as choruses, which the album is mostly missing. If their best songs felt like they pointed to a wild, open world just out of reach, WE’s songs are determined in their navel-gazing smallness. The hollow press gesture of WE as a “back to basics” album is made even emptier due to the gestural, generic songwriting where jarring, weird lyrics (“We unsubscribe/fuck season five”) pull you out of any mood the songs had established.
Previous Arcade Fire albums like Neon Bible may have been pretentious and perhaps over-instrumented, but at least they burst at the seams with ideas and musical counterpoint, even when minimal. WE’s songs are ultimately shallow and empty, song sketches ballooned up to seem important but ultimately delivering zero-calorie Big Feels.
For example - second single “Unconditional I” hits a “doot doo doo de doo” refrain that would be almost charming if it didn’t also bridge the album’s most cloying lyrical generalities“growing up is hard” generalities - “Lookout kid, trust your mind/But you can't trust it everytime.” Even the album’s synth-laden dance offerings sound dessicated and underbaked, like singers Win Butler and Regine Chassagne are singing alone in a karaoke booth.
I take no joy in saying all this, by the way!! I’ve seen Arcade Fire six times, all of which are some of the best live shows I’ve ever seen, life-changing shows filled with wonder. Like other writers who seem hellbent on giving them the benefit of the doubt, I wanted this album to be a return to what I loved about the band. But WE’s glaring lack of ideas, lyrically and musically, show that it’s not the sonics but the writing that made their earlier eras powerful, and they album woefully underdelivers.
And now, on to this week’s tracks! You can follow along on our playlist on Spotify and Apple Music, which update every Tuesday along with the newsletter.
THE UNSKIPPABLES #35
The Smile - Thin Thing
This is the first truly great song from the new Jonny Greenwood/Thom Yorke/Tom Skinner trio, thanks to a rubbery “is it a synth or guitar??” part from Greenwood. The song is more of a loose jam than a hard-hitting alt rock song, but the propulsive main riff and smart use of distorted bass and synths keep the band on uneven, dangerous ground the entire song.
Kehlani - wish i never
Kehlani has delivered the year’s most generous R&B record, rich with ideas and personality across both ballads and bangers - with “wish i never” standing out amongst the latter. Kehlani is a charming center of gravity across the entire record, their fun and playful vocal pocket delivering the cover to make a sample like the Slick Rick beat on “wish i never” overdeliver. Kehlani makes all of this sound easy, but the song’s could be oversweet and cloying in lesser hands.
Belle and Sebastian - Reclaim The Night
A “banger” by Belle and Sebastian standards, “Reclaim The Night” builds around slight chord change and crisp stomp, giving Sarah Martin’s light vocal a clever and coy angle. Tic tac bass and a rising arpeggiator give the whole song a noir edge, but like the rest of the excellent A Bit Of Previous, the song captures the bookish fun Belle & Sebastian are known best for.
Kendrick Lamar - The Heart, part 5
What, like I’m not putting this on this week’s listen? Listen to the song! It’s as good as you’d hope. The delightful backbeat drop at 1:30 is an added bonus to the rush of hearing Kendrick back on the mic.
Clyde Crooks - Alice!
“Alice!” is the latest from Clyde Crooks, a purveyor of syrupy, R&B-leaning bedroom pop from Los Angeles Clyde switches his flow as often as the song switches flavors over its 1:45 - which is to say, more times than you’d expect, and enough to make you wonder what would happen if he held on to this pastel-colored bop for another minute.
THROWBACK CORNER
The Mountain Goats - The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton
Including this song this week for three reasons:
The album that this song came from, All Hail West Texas, is 20 years old this year, released the same year as his other masterpiece Tallahassee.
This song’s weird bleak hope almost made me cry while hungover as hell on a plane ride back to NY on Sunday.
It features an all-time, Springsteen-level lyric about crushed hope - “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank you or forgive you / The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton will in time both outpace and outlive you.”
Aaaaand that’s all for this week, folks! Please subscribe if you’d like these opinions straight in your inbox. See you next week!