"Guess we'll just have to adjust"

Marcello's post helped me get a few things straight: Arcade Fire's Neon Bible is a thrilling record, alternately ridiculous and terrifying. Just because this style of melodrama isn't usually to my taste doesn't mean I can't acknowledge this collective's achievement. It's the songs' dynamics -- in which weird, disorienting orchestral and vocal swoops substitute for instrumental solos -- that consistently enthrall: how Regine Cassagne's refrain of "In my head" cuts into Win Butler's frantic reverie in "The Well and the Lighthouse," as a taunt and an echo; the clouds of white noise, cumulonimbi of strings, and the compelling overwroughtness of Butler's voice create a tension that more than obviates a malaise that, to their credit, seems felt not received, even if they think lines like "eating in the ghetto on a hundred-dollar plate" are meaningful. Depending on my mood, the quiet numbers spook me like the fast ones don't. "Ocean of Noise" seethes like one of the clenched-jawed ballads on The Velvet Underground's third album. Juxtaposed against "working for the church while your family dies," Biblical tropes like "don't wanna live in my father's house" adduce honest anger if not sadness at the way things have gotta be. In this sense, Arcade Fire are realists, not the romantics their critics (and fans) accuse them of being.

Again, the arrangements are Gothic-scale, but not the emotions. Neon Bible collects the most lucid teenaged spiral notebook self-hatred ever written (your body's a cage, swelling and mutating beyond your ability to control it, meanwhile the world to which your parents and teachers belong is controlled by warmongers and authoritarians like them). But the images of flight, coupled with the brisk tempos of songs like "(Antichrist Television Blues)" and "No Cars Go," don't signify escape so much as thought: we have to solve our own problems, and quickly, for time's running out. The emo bands to which Arcade Fire are stupidly compared don't aim for the still point in the vortex. Hell, most of us don't. Arcade Fire don't imagine a place where no cars go: they know a place, and they'll show you if you clear your head of bullshit, as Neon Bible records song by song ("Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles"-- Ralph Waldo Emerson). Don't think this will solve the problems. At first I thought ending the record with "My Body is a Cage" is a mistake; coming at the heels of the strength-in-numbers affirmations of "No Cars Go," we're back to the black mirror and hortatory cathedral organs. But that's life, isn't it? Which is why the greatest lyric Butler will ever write (on Funeral's "Wake Up") is "I guess we'll just have to adjust." The second greatest? "I'm gonna work it out" ("Ocean of Noise"). Psychoanalytic cliches work if we actually use them.