I owe Arcade Fire a BIG apology. I was ready to write them off as a one-album wonder. 2004's Funeral was great, but it had to be a fluke. Sure, they might release one more album, but it wouldn't have a prayer of coming anywhere near their first one, so that would be the end of them. Arcade Fire would just quietly slip away. After all, there are just too many people in the band. It would be impossible to hold them all together. Well, mea culpa, Win Butler and company, because not only did the Canadian collective pull themselves together, they actually pole-vaulted right over their old album. Yes, that's right Neon Bible tops Funeral and then some!
Much more than just a collection of songs, Arcade Fire's second disc is almost a spiritual experience, albeit a dark one. The musical world the band created bares a striking resemblance to our own. It's the kind of place where God has thrown up his hands and abandoned his troublesome earthlings, even as Butler pleads, "I'm asking you why!" on the song "Antichrist Television."
There is definitely an electric current running through Neon Bible. Sometimes it's charged with paranoia (the deliciously dark "Black Mirror"), and sometimes it rumbles with a restless energy (the warm, Springsteenish "Keep the Car Running"), but the one theme that holds it all together is the desire to escape. Anything and everything must be left behind, from relationships, described on "Ocean of Noise" as "the ocean of violence between me and you," to entire countries. "I don't want to live in America anymore," chants the band on "Windowsill."
It's hard to pick one song that tops all the others since each track works so wonderfully with the next, but if I had to choose, I would single out the hypnotic title track, repeated in the chorus as “NE-on BI-ble,” and the album's closer, the wonderful workingman blues song "My Body is a Cage." "Body" may start as a slow spiritual, but when that organ crescendos and is answered by a pounding drumbeat that's almost tribal, you'll know . . . you'll know that you just heard one of the best albums of the year.
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