Arcade Fire were in a position to do basically anything they wanted for their sophomore effort. With Funeral winning the adoration of critics, music fans and Davids from Bowie to Byrne, there was a lot of pressure from studios and radio stations alike to tailor their music to the popular consciousness. And even though their music was essentially made to be played in large crowds, the band would only enter this world on their terms. What were Arcade Fire’s terms for Neon Bible exactly? Well, to not enter it at all.
Instead the band kept themselves busy in new locations, specifically a Canadian church which they converted into a studio. With this move would come a wardrobe change and a music direction set to fill the furthest ends of the aisles. Mandolins, trumpets and most noticeably a church organ were placed into the band’s sonic landscape, a setting concerned with things that we reflect upon: mirrors; television screens; the ocean; religion. Obviously reflections would play a big part in their other even numbered album, but it is still very much prevalent in Neon Bible’s isolated world.
And when we think normally of isolation and reflection, we think of quiet intimate spaces wherein we look into ourselves. That’s not the case for Neon Bible. Sure, it’s as personal as any Arcade Fire record, but the music is loud and bombastic, heard upon breaking waves and driving cars. The songs themselves are more segregated than Funeral’s multi part suites and changing song tempos (there’s only one or two here that are particularly obvious). But it makes up for that with more ambitious textures and more varied influences infused within its conception (in seeming eighties nostalgia from the Americana of Springsteen to the Art pop of Kate Bush). Occasionally that makes the song’s overwrought in the lyrical section, very much accusatory of our contemporary lifestyles and as seemingly Luddite as many a Radiohead record. But Neon Bible still understands not to paint the past as an ideal upon which to return, but that ideas and problems of the past manifest themselves into modern mirrors. Modern life is not the only thing keeping us trapped in cages.
Instead of entering the record as we would expect from an album called Neon Bible, which organs and perhaps gospel elements, we arrive amidst thundering kettle drum, crashing against the guitars as though they were waves. The scene “Black Mirror” sets is cinematic, with escalating pianos and violins strings matching the rising tension as Win mixes the metaphors of the dark sea and images from security cameras to create one “Black Mirror” that darkly reflects our own lives (I presume it and the television show Black Mirror have similar intent). This won’t be the first time the waves of the sea and the waves of television signals are connected in this album.
Nor is “Keep the Car Running” the only mention of the vehicle, but here a symbol of hope and escape where later on it shall be shunned. Like on Funeral it turns an urban location into an almost mythic setting, the descriptions of “the same old city with a different name” “the same city where I go to sleep” being almost nightmarish. The music counteracts the darkness with one of the brightest compositions on the entire album. The mandolins and bright “honky tonk” piano complement each other perfectly, interlocking with guitars that have an almost surf rock vibe to them, driving as fast as the aforementioned cars.
But where “Keep the Car Running” was bright and outward, the title track is moody and internal. Electric buzzes sizzle in the background like a neon sign as the band partakes in the light playing of their guitars, drum and violins. Well, for Arcade Fire anyway (To think this album was supposed to be stripped down). And in the light that “Neon Bible” omits Win discusses the book whilst repeating the refrain “It’s in the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible/Not much chance for survival/ If the Neon Bible is right”. Well, until the last word of course, because it’s not worth the Neon Bible just being right: It’s also has to be “true”.
This albums seems to love its contrasts (they come in waves, you could say!) for where the previous image was so obviously contemporary, “Intervention” deals with images that feel like history, of Kings setting off soldiers to war and people “working for the church while [their] family dies”. Of course, the images of Church/State work well into many people’s modern mindsets. “Intervention” was reported to be the first song written for the album, and even as a mid-track it exemplifies the record’s objectives well. Its heightened emotions of dying soldiers and children are so matched by church organs that it fully embraces the excesses of Neon Bible to some of the best effects on the album. By the final key change, the song itself seems to embrace this sense of abandonment, matched by the solider’s final lines of “We’ll go at it alone.”
But Neon Bible’s biggest embrace of contrast comes at the two titled “Black Wave/Bad Vibrations”. The two titles are appropriate as it is essentially two different ideas smashed together. The first contain Régine’s only lead vocals on the entire album, with rapid drumming and choral backings mimicking the narrator’s running from her troubles, her “memories”. Barring the production it sounds like something that would have been on Funeral. But just at the point where the songs would have moved into another sound, here we are hit with the black wave. Win returns with an oppressive verse of blackness and “nothing lasts forever that’s the way it’s gotta be” that is so continuous it becomes an onslaught. But with the xylophones and angelic voices in the background, this new composition does not act as some random event; if anything it is a heavenly fate, “For me” and “For you”.
Given how the first song began with a male protagonist near the sea and the previous song a female character was hit by the black wave – the final lyrics speaking “The sound is not asleep, it’s moving under my feet” – it fits that at the midway point we come to the “Ocean of Noise.” The thunder returns under atmospheric guitar, strings, clashing woodwinds and bartender piano that wouldn’t sound that out of place in the Tom Wait’s catalogue. This imagery of sounds and lies is like the dark breakup to the love song of “Crown of Love” from the previous album, another embrace of fate that is now much more reserved and defeating: “Now who here among us still believes in choice? Not I!”
While “Ocean of Noise” embraced the Americana of Tom Waits, “The Well and the Lighthouse is closer to that of the Boss himself Bruce Springsteen. This song is not as memorable as other Springsteen influenced tracks that would run throughout The Suburbs, but is strengthed in the album context as one of the album’s most optimistic tracks with bright piano and violin noises amid thumping bass and percussion. Lighthouses of course are a strong beacon of clarity for those out of sea, and this in turn serves as the bright and sturdy turning point after the oceans of noise, in the narrator’s own words resurrecting him. It is also structured very much like a Funeral track, given how the end completely changes tempo and time signatures (here as a waltz), which in that album also served as a sign of new life.
“(Antichrist Television Blues)” completes this trifecta of obvious Americana influences with a big ol’ tribute to Bob Dylan in its title. It combines acoustic rambling with gospel backings as the lyrics take their most overtly Christian themed track, with a lead character so afraid of God that . The lyrics – barring the strange “mocking bird don’t sing,” emblematic of some of the strange manipulating of clichés in Neon Bible that don’t work – are on point and expresses the whole album’s thoughts of entrapment in a modern society. The abrupt end on “Antichrist” is spine chilling.
“Windowsill” might be the weak point of Neon Bible, as it takes a little too long to get going, but it continues with the themes of “(Antichrist Television Blues)” and themes of television in a thorough way. The MTV line even seems a self effacing line at the bands own refusal to be played on major stations. I like to think of it as from the point of view of the preacher’s daughter, though that might have been more apparent if Régine sang this song. And by the end of the song the narrator’s pleas from freedom seem to be granted, as the music builds up with trumpets, choruses and screeching violins in a grandiose and liberating way.
In full liberation mode, Arcade Fire decides to lift the best song of its little heard EP and give it the extravagant treatment that it deserved. The “No Cars Go” here is filled to the brim with trumpets and a synth bass that doesn’t sound out of place at all, the drums and other instrumentation powering on like the vehicles that the song rejects. To Neon Bible it is now something that gets in the way of true dreams, in that respect a rejection of an symbol of Americana after the band had so thoroughly embraced it. On this album the track moves from another cross between youth and nostalgia, and instead becomes another symbol of rebellion. Even the last line of “Don’t know where we’re going” is somewhat positive, as at least it is lack of direction with intent.
If we had concluded here the album would end on a note of optimism as big as Funeral’s. Instead we end with a coda of fear and self doubt. After rejecting everything else about society, the narrator realises in a Descartian manner that “My Body is a Cage,” that there are still problems ahead that they can only break by stepping out of themselves, which is itself an impossible feat. “My Body is a Cage” ends the album on something both bombastic and intimate. Essentially a religious mass for the self, with kettle drums, rumbling guitars and of course the soaring church organs that bring the Neon Bible to a close.
Neon Bible is not as consistent as Funeral in terms on a song by song basis (although I do think it is an objectively better produced record, as much as that is worth anything). Occasionally the ambition of the album confuses loudness with emotional. But that ambition also helps the highs of the album to be so much higher, and when everything unifies it contains some of the great moments. Arcade Fire had shut themselves in a large building to create some of the most unifying songs about isolation. And that got them even more of an audience.
Mainstream popularity was going to come whether they liked it or not…
What did you think, though?
Arcade Fire Album Rankings
- Funeral
- Neon Bible