19 Thoughts on Arcade Fire's Reflektor
- Sometimes I come up with the first paragraph of these posts way before I sit down and write it, other times I just sit down and start writing stuff and see what comes out. This installment was firmly in the former category before I took a walk and realized (without looking it up, on my phone, in my pocket) that if Reflektor came out in 2014, it would change the first paragraph drastically. Then I rewrote it in my head while writing. Then I got back home and sat down to start writing this and looked up when it came out, and it turns out I was right the first time—it came out in 2013. So who knows what I’m doing over here.
- But yeah, now I can write what I was originally going to write. Anyway! While I was doing the series of essays on 2013 last year, a few people asked me on Twitter if I’d be writing about certain albums and in most cases I wasn’t, simply because I was focusing more on albums that had a greater cultural impact as opposed to albums that simply were very good-to-almost perfect. I don’t think Reflektor was ever mentioned, but it was an album I considered and ultimately decided not to focus on for that very reason.
- I can’t think of a Big Album from 2013 that was less impactful than Reflektor, actually. Maybe a better question to ask is when the last time Arcade Fire actually possessed a substantial cultural impact?
- Similar to Reflektor, Neon Bible came out during what would be a monumental year (2007) for varying strains of indie and pop, but unlike other Class of ‘07 releases like Panda Bear’s Person Pitch and M.I.A.’s Kala, it left no real traceable footprint of influence. The Suburbs effectively served as a coronation in terms of Arcade Fire’s ascent to Real Rock Music royalty, the Grammy win being the final grand gesture—but, again, nothing surrounding it that year or the years after suggested that there were bands taking any sort of cues from the band’s era. We’ll talk about Everything Now later.
- Funeral was obviously a star-making debut as well as one of a series of albums (Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People before it, Wolf Parade’s Apologies to the Queen Mary after) that cemented Canada at large as a reliable cultural importer of guitar-driven indie rock. And it is probably Arcade Fire’s only album that felt like a locus point for something, albeit not in the increasingly corporatized world of indie rock (which, until the post-Person Pitch home-recording movement took off near the end of 2008, was largely split between fourth-wave post-punk suit-wearers, folk-y acoustic raconteurs a la Sufjan Stevens and the Decemberists, and off-center experimental pop constantly rearranging its own DNA during Animal Collective’s incredible 2000s run).
- When I think of Arcade Fire’s influence, I think of bands like Family of the Year—the same way that, when I think of TV on the Radio’s influence, I think of bands like twenty one pilots and Imagine Dragons. (I wrote about that for Vulture a few years ago.) Family of the Year are nothing special in the end, a Los Angeles rock band practically designed for KCRW placement and armed with generic music that’s just anthemic and passionate enough without risking real potential for embarrassment—in other words, Funeral with the edges sanded down, no real risks taken. The above song closed out an episode of Girls, effectively; you’ll undoubtedly recognize “Hero” from the trailer and film itself of Richard Linklater’s masterful epic Boyhood.
- First of two asides, this one to get something out of the way for posterity: When Family of the Year’s self-titled album from 2015 came out, I recommended it to colleague Ian Cohen mostly because I thought a few songs sounded nice and wanted to know if I was just out of my mind for enjoying it. The verdict was that I was. (As always, I subscribe to the truism that you can enjoy something that you know is total mediocre bullshit if it sounds nice on any level.)
- Second aside: a great example of satisfying end-credits music is when Arcade Fire’s “Deep Blue” hits at the end of Boyhood.
- Maybe it’s less important to think about the bands Arcade Fire have begat than to look at the lineage that they’re carrying on. They’re basically as close to a heir to U2’s throne—world-beating, über-passionate, six-thousand-foot-tall rock music—as we’ve gotten since 9/11 and we’ll probably get for another ten years. And, make no mistake: they were made for this, from the opening notes of Funeral on. Arcade Fire never traded up in terms of popularity, they just reached the point they were naturally destined to reach.
- U2 are a band that I still have yet to truly like in any real way, but I obviously like Arcade Fire a lot. If they ever get the Greatest Hits treatment, there will be plenty to choose from to the point where outrageous omissions are all but garanteed. They’re easily one of the best big-ticket rock bands of the last 20 years, and I don’t think they’ve made an outright bad album to date. (Again, we’ll talk about Everything Now later.)
- Funeral puts up a good fight, but I sincerely believe at this point that Reflektor is their best album. I love the production on Neon Bible and appreciate its Funeral-writ-larger embellishments, The Suburbs has some career-best songs but tends to exhaust me in terms of a front-to-back listen—but Reflektor holds my attention most from start to finish. It’s the band’s most costume-y album, as they switch between rock variants and rock-indebted dance sounds with giddiness and a total lack of guile. Its sonic sprawl feels limitless and lively, I’ve felt this since it came out and am only more certain of it with the passage of time.
- My favorite Reflektor song is “You Already Know,” which reminds me of the Smiths. The best Reflektor song is probably “Afterlife,” and how I’m differentiating between “best” and “favorite” is anyone’s guess including mine, but it feels truthful.
- Reflektor got good reviews when it came out, but I feel like public opinion has soured on it a bit? Or at least I’ve seen critics making arguments over the past few years that it’s actually one of their worst albums? Obviously, as corporate-funded music writing drifts further and further away from being able to properly reassess anything unfavorably, there’s no real proof I have here beyond Twitter conversations that rattle around in my mind. I swear that people have said this though, really—enough so that it’s convinced me that it might be a widely held viewpoint.
- One thing I will allow to that possibly-imaginary argument is that Reflektor is outsized to the point where it invites ridicule. The Greek mythos stuff feels all over the place at times, and then there’s “Porno.” I mean, there’s no way I’m going to stick up for “Porno.”
- Haha, unless…Look, I like “Porno.” I do! I think the groove is really solid and eerie, the verse melody is strong. The chorus could be better, and the lyrics are, well, well-intentioned if not much else. It’s certainly the most embarrassing moment on Reflektor, but I find the embarrassment endearing.
- And isn’t that the point of Arcade Fire? The band’s often found great success at abandoning any attempt at pretense and just going for it, an approach that practically guarantees an uneven risk-reward ratio. I can’t help but, at absolute worst, shrug off the clumsy quasi-woke dirge that is “Porno” simply because its existence itself is startling and infamous in my mind, two qualities that so much indie-situated music from the 2010s just simply aren’t.
- I suspect that those tendencies to approach failure played a role in the overall reception that Everything Now received. People sure didn’t like it! But I listen to it even now and ask myself, “…Why?” I mean, sure, any album that features a song called “Infinite Content” is basically target practice for the timeline. But even though it’s undoubtedly Arcade Fire’s weakest album, it still sounds resolutely not-bad to me—a minor work, maybe, from a band that’s made a few major ones. But, seriously, the worst thing you could say about Everything Now is that it’s like if U2 did Zooropa now, right? (Again, I don’t really “get” U2 overall so if I’m totally off the mark with that comparison, know it’s not coming from an extremely informed place.)
- I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that we’re starting to run out of bands like Arcade Fire—or, more specifically, that the past decade hasn’t really seen any act “like them” even come close to emerge. Maybe you see this as a good thing, and that’s fine. I don’t really see it as good or bad, because to label it the former would be disingenuous (I’m a fan, obviously) and to label it the latter would probably be discouraging the natural progression of generational trends and preferences, which I’m also not into doing.
- But when I look at who are undoubtedly set as the biggest 2010s-emerging names in overground indie, I see bands whose biggest statements feel intimate in size, even as the silence surrounding their music could fill up a room. (The most recent Car Seat Headrest album is a solid example of an artist doing a high-concept tightrope walk a la Arcade Fire’s often stage-y approach, albeit one that didn’t work out too well in execution.) Ambition continues to sound like something very different as indie as a marketing term continues to mutate, and I wonder how Arcade Fire will fit into the framework whenever they decide to return again.