Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (2007)

1) Black Mirror; 2) Keep the Car Running; 3) Neon Bible; 4) Intervention; 5) Black Wave/Bad Vibrations; 6) Ocean of Noise; 7) The Well and the Lighthouse; 8) (Antichrist Television Blues); 9) Windowsill; 10) No Cars Go; 11) My Body Is a Cage

Arcade Fire hear people talk about their epic sound and decide that yes, we can top that.

Key tracks: "Intervention", "No Cars Go", "My Body Is a Cage"

Funeral was a record of skyscraping anthems which stole people's hearts at large, but it came from a grounded setting: it was music by a group of ordinary people escaping shared sorrow through communal celebration, manifested into something larger than all of them combined. I don’t think Arcade Fire necessarily meant to make it so colossal, it just shaped up that way through the combined power of a collective of multi-instrumentalists putting all of their hearts behind the music. But the size of their sound became Arcade Fire’s shtick: their songs became synonymous with the rapturous joy of hundreds or thousands of individuals singing along to every wordless melody, strings and bells and whistles in tow. 

On the other hand Neon Bible, the direct follow-up to Funeral, is a giant by design. The crowd-raiser moments are grander, the choruses bellow out bigger and the drama fuelling them is more intense, and it’s the clearest in the production. Neon Bible's crescendoing walls of sound are made up of layers upon layers of elements that expand far beyond the capacities of the band themselves: there’s choirs, there’s orchestras, there’s the booming church organ that’s become the album’s signature sound even though it only appears in two songs. A lot of the hyper-awareness to a wider concept and unifying design which has become second nature for the band (for the chagrin of some) started to pop up at this stage as well, with unified dress codes, cryptic teaser trailers and running threads through the otherwise unrelated lyrics. This was Arcade Fire intentionally going big, extending their reach far beyond Funeral's scope as if to prove they deserved to be one of the biggest acts of the Pitchforkverse. The message of Neon Bible went the same route and also took a leap further from the personal drama of its predecessor, as it cast its sights into the wider world. It’s not subtle about its message - “not much chance of survival if the Neon Bible is right” - and its delivered with the fire of an apocalyptic preacher shouting at the masses about the end of the world. Funeral was a happy accident of circumstances - Neon Bible was made from the ground up to be a bombastic show of force, a band trying to direct their own hype by amplifying what they understood made them special the first time around.

As a direct result there's a kind of po-faced self-awareness and intentional seriousness around Neon Bible. “Black Mirror” kicks off the album like a cult leader summoning forth the titular device to reflect on the doom and gloom of the world, and from thereon in the album conjures another apocalyptic theme after another. Greed, war, delusion, personal disillusionment, religious hypocrisy; even the moments of escapism sound uncertain, like when the “let’s go” rallying calls of “No Cars Go” are undercut with a quiet “don’t know where we’re going...” just as the music switches gears. It’s clear Win Butler wants to be a spokesperson for Important Things and though he’s not always successful (for every insight he makes, he throws out a clunker like “MTV, what have you done to me?”), he’s absolutely earnest about his intentions. His power as a frontman - and to the same extent Regine Chassagné's power as his vocal counterpart - is the undoubting passion and sincerity he brings into his ideas and performance, and the conviction and zeal which made the personal anecdotes of Funeral so strong are just as powerful here. If Butler is preachy, then he’s the kind of preacher who can charm a crowd to eat up every single warning of fire and brimstone he can shout out. And this time he’s come armed with the sound most overwhelming: out of all Arcade Fire albums, Neon Bible leans heaviest into the innate epic theatrics of the band.  

I have an unabashed, probably uncool love for music that sounds massive. It doesn't suit everything and it's not a surefire way to win my praise, but my heart does often flutter with honest awe when steady build-ups explode into epic finales: I'm the guy who will predictably love all those epic closer songs hovering around ends of tracklists, smiling as the fireworks and production credits explode during the credits roll. Neon Bible is, basically, one such moment after another, with everything but the title track (which is a quiet, two-minute rumination that's more characteristic of an interlude) going gigantic at least once during its course, sometimes several times in different ways. It has its musical vision set to the absolute maximum, the epic finales of Funeral turned into full songs. And it never fails, because Arcade Fire are geniuses in this game. Neon Bible may put on the guise of serious doom mongering, but in practice it's a thrill ride: joy and anxiety holding hands and riding a tidal wave of production elements and elaborate arrangements, moving from one instrumental high to another, everyone hollering and encouraging the listener to join. The lyrical concepts accompanying the music may falter from time to time from scaling up, but in the song department the band score perfect strikes in a fearsomely consistent fashion. 

The reason I love big bombastic finales so much is because when executed properly, they are incredibly cathartic - they explicitly pull out those big emotions out of you and give them the ability to spread their wings with the music, making you feel that nothing matters in this world but the very moment you're connecting with right now. But you need the right kind of song to go with it, and there isn't a single track on Neon Bible that doesn't hit that mark, so much so that reading through the tracklist becomes a catalogue of moments in time when I've been overwhelmed by the Great Big Feeling that they coaxed out: the communal hand-clap hullaballoo of "Keep the Car Running", the liberating freak-out breakdown splicing through the hyper-rockabilly of "(Antichrist Television Blues)", the swelling feels that sweep in as the band on "Windowsill" are drowned by the choir and wipe away the memories of the lyric about MTV, the "Un! Deux! Trois! Dis miroir noir!" in "Black Mirror", the technicolour light of the blissed-out chorus to "The Well and the Lighthouse", the tone flip when the bright "Black Wave" morphs into "Black Vibrations" and the song feels the pressure of the shadow of the great all-drowning sea looming over it. They are wonderful songs through and through full of hooks and melodies that live on, that funnel their powers towards a singular point until they burst in ecstatic magic.

The greatest showcase for the power of the album’s arrangements lies towards the end. “No Cars Go” was first released on the band’s debut EP, but it's an awkward fit there: a good idea begging for an execution that doesn't leave it limping across the floor. Here, it's been brought back and resurrected into the colossus it aspired to be. Every single second of it goes off - each swoon of its strings, each voice in the choir, each underpinning note of the horn section, the completely superlative breakdown following its second chorus that is one of purest expressions of joy in music I've heard. It’s potentially the most bombastic Arcade Fire have ever been but it deserves to be larger than life, and it sounds so, so gorgeous in this final form: it's the ideal behind every life-affirming moment that was heard on Funeral, gilded and tangible. It's the natural peak for Neon Bible's multi-faceted journey, and following it up with something else in the tracklist seems like a surefire way to be let down by context, but "My Body Is a Cage" defies any expectations you'd set for it subconsciously. What you'd expect for a fitting follow-up to "No Cars Go" to close the record would be to attempt to scale its epic heights even further, or do something completely contrasting, and so "My Body Is a Cage" does both. It's the album's darkest moment, the neon shades of the bible faintly flickering on and off one by one, with Win Butler singing from what sounds like the middle of oblivion - far from the blissful optimism that came before. But more significantly, there are two songs on the album that feature the majestic, all-encompassing grand church organ, which by its very nature is literally the biggest musical showpiece on the record, and "My Body Is a Cage" is one of the two. That moment halfway through as the organ kicks into full gear following a brief silence and when the band try to match its loudness and intensity is the sound of the apocalypse coming that the Neon Bible warned about all the way back at the start of the record. It makes the hairs on your back stand up for attention: Win Butler yearns for redemption and liberation and he sings it with such conviction that you, too, start to believe in its rapture. It's a phenomenal showpiece, and a stunning way to close the album.

The other organ-featuring song is "Intervention", which is an Arcade Fire powerhouse moment on steroids. Build-ups, back and forth vocals, impassioned performance, fist-pumping chorus - but now with a giant organ right off the bat and an orchestra to accompany it (the moment when the strings appear is one of the band's greatest singular moments). It's unashamedly huge, and it's basically manna from heaven for my musical tastebuds; and it's a perfect example that no matter how many things you place on top of one another on Neon Bible, they each still get the breathing space needed to make an impact. It's a impressive song with an impressive sound, yet still so full of little details and atmosphere which turn it from great to iconic. The arrangements serve the songs and the other way around: both built around one another in perfect symbiosis, the production emphasising the tonal undercurrents of the songs that were from the get-go written for these grand ideas. And while everything on Neon Bible is huge in comparison to many other albums, it's still at its very best when it really goes all-in on that impactful wall of sound, as evidenced by "Intervention", "No Cars Go", "My Body Is a Cage", or "Ocean of Noise". That song may be the album's most graceful moment - a yearning slow dance by the moonlit pier - but it becomes something wholly different when Butler backs away and lets the strings and horns take over as the lead, every colour in the spectrum flooding in synesthesic beauty and tugging more heartstrings than any singular voice ever could. Neon Bible sometimes literally covers its singers with its arrangements, but it becomes the logical extension for the feelings those voices started to express, amplifying them rather than drowning them out.

Because Neon Bible and Arcade Fire get it. They get why these grand bombastic moments can hit so powerfully to the listener, why sometimes you should strive for something universal, and they understand how you can make something so big without it sounding crowded or overproduced. Sounding epic isn't simply about making things louder: it's about taking the core emotion of the song, and then reshaping it with other tools until it becomes the core of very moment you live in. Neon Bible is in my books a perfect representation of that. It resonates because it makes a point about stirring its - and your - emotions into its central tenet: be it the grim foreboding, the tearjerking bittersweetness or the unbridled glee that the band so effortlessly weave in and out and in-between from. Despite how it's a less intimate album than its predecessor, which it often gets compared to as its immediate follow-up, Neon Bible has always felt more personal to me than Funeral. I joined the Funeral hype squad a little after everyone else already had, but Neon Bible felt like my discovery, my experience to intake. The impatient wait for it - with the radio rips, the enticing samples in the teaser trailer (still one of my favourite album trailers) and the internet breadcrumb trail of news that was still something novel - and the eventual first time of hearing its massive sound through my speakers made the album that much more impactful on a personal level, with all those hopes and dreams for what the album could be turning into a reality. It struck a particular connection with me, and over the years it has become more than just its music for me - it's an experience that feels close to my own heart specifically, where I feel like my entire body pays attention to when I listen to it. It's a special record and it's not because of its message or concept or themes - Butler has never made for much of a social commentator and while it has some stand-out moments ("My Body Is a Cage" in particular) lyrically, I'm not intimately attached to the words on the album like I am with many others of my perfect score records. But if a picture says more than a thousand words, then in Neon Bible's case those orchestras, organs, horns and several passionate Canadians shouting harmonies into the microphone express more than any lyric ever could.

Rating: 10/10

Physical corner: Jewel case stored in a cardboard sleeve, and a wonderfully thick lyric/art booklet with alternative artwork underneath the main artwork on the sleeve.