It can be a poisoned chalice when bands start out as critically lauded indie-rock pioneers then hit the big time and blow up into a stadium rock success story. With mass popularity, any number of pitfalls lay in wait to derail an artist – writer’s block, self-satisfaction, compromise, hifalutin ideas, too many “yes” men, drugs, ego and on and on.
And then, of course, there’s the public’s never-ending thirst for the new, and the rock-bore attitude of “I only liked them before they signed to a major label”, a situation perfectly summed up by Regurgitator in 1997’s cutting-but-catchy I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff.
Arcade Fire have returned with We, their first new album in five years.Credit:Michael Marcelle
But often it’s not us, it’s them, and after a band blows up, they might beef up, bland out, and lose what made them so interesting in the first place. Hello, Kings Of Leon. And welcome to the conundrums faced by Canadian collective Arcade Fire and Akron, Ohio duo The Black Keys.
Arcade Fire are coming off the back of what most critics consider their worst album, 2017’s largely unloved and sometimes outright pilloried Everything Now. Accompanied by a parody promo campaign that backfired badly, it was designed as an Achtung Baby-style exercise in satire and social commentary, but too arch by half. For a band that blew the doors off with the unbridled passion of their 2004 debut Funeral and the emotive masterwork that is their 2010 concept album The Suburbs, it was a long fall to earth.
On paper, the elevator pitch for their sixth album, We, pushes all the buttons marked “Pink Floyd-esque pretensions”, with their bio explaining that the record is a “cathartic journey” that “follows a distinct arc from darkness into light over the course of seven songs divided into two sides.”
Alrighty then.
The good news is that they don’t use a sledgehammer to get this point across. Yes, there’s plenty of hand-wringing and brow-furrowing about wanting to unsubscribe from the end of the world and crying while watching the moon on the ocean where California used to be. But they’ve rediscovered interesting ways to say all this, rather than the po-faced art-school rock stars they turned into on the last record.
End Of The Empire I-IV is an ambitious four-parter that finds common ground between Ziggy Stardust and OK Computer. And on the album’s back half they tap back into that celebratory thing that made them so beloved, whether it’s the heartland rock of The Lightning I, II or the Tom Tom Club-meets-Tune-Yards loopiness of Unconditional II (Race And Religion).