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\n Their business-as-usual approach dovetails with a year of acts from Brand New to Ryan Adams looking to put a wide range of allegations of misconduct in the rearview mirror by giving diehards a show of talent to talk about instead and little else.
\n Photo: Erika Goldring\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Don\u2018t think of a pink elephant!\u2019 is an impossible instruction,\u201d psychologist Janice Morse and philosopher Carl Mitcham wrote in a 2002 International Journal of Qualitative Methods article<\/a>, \u201cfor once the idea of a pink elephant is mentioned, it cannot be erased from one\u2019s consciousness.\u201d The paradox offers a heady if puzzling thematic conceit for the return of Arcade Fire<\/a> with their seventh album, Pink Elephant. It gives the title track a clever rhetorical inversion: Front man Win Butler begs someone to have fun and stop worrying about him for a change while expressing love via an inability to take his mind off them, reinforcing dedication through attempts to fight it. The psych conundrum looms heavily over the first Arcade Fire project <\/strong>following a very public reputational upheaval. There is something we can\u2019t stop thinking about, in spite of great effort, intruding on our perception of the art and the artist once seen as a scrappy successor to the statement-rock thrones of \u201970s and \u201980s titans like David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen.<\/p>\n A Pitchfork report<\/a> before their WE tour in fall 2022 uncovered multiple claims that Butler had wielded his influence and social-media presence to coerce young women into sex and to send them unwanted graphic texts during the late 2010s. His response offered an admission of infidelity and a string of rebuttals to each claim of misdoing. His wife and bandmate, R\u00e9gine Chassagne, expressed faith in her husband and disbelief in the allegation that he had forced himself on one of his accusers: \u201cI know what is in his heart, and I know he has never, and would never, touch a woman without her consent and I am certain he never did. He has lost his way and he has found his way back.\u201d Beck and Feist quit the tour<\/a>, but Juno and Grammy Awards nominations and festival engagements continued. A wave of disappointment washed over devotees; nevertheless, the tour beat on.<\/p>\n Ahead of Pink Elephant, the Montreal collective known for its insistent politics and uplifting lyricism was scarce and guarded in its direct communications. You could catch a breezy North American tour focusing on small venues or download the new Circle of Trust app to listen to Santa Pirata Radio, a podcast starring Butler and Chassagne. Outside of an appearance on SNL<\/a> that tepidly re-created the guitar smashing of their 2007 debut on the show, <\/strong>the band has evaded opportunities to speak out. <\/strong>SNL might have been the only time you caught sight of them if you weren\u2019t poking around Circle or posting up outside concert venue doors, where performances have spilled out into drum circles on the streets. It\u2019s head-turning for the indie darlings who blossomed into festival headliners, award winners, and Billboard chart toppers. Their launches are typically loud and sometimes polarizing, clearing space for music that is endlessly if sometimes bristlingly exuberant: 2017\u2019s Everything Now arrived amid a flurry of meta-commentary on negativity in social media, which Butler maintains<\/a> is mischaracterized as snark; 2022\u2019s bustling, hopeful WE enjoyed a battery of radio, podcast, and magazine chats. Now, what little frankness we get is limited to Arcade Fire\u2019s places of power.<\/p>\n Pink Elephant steeps itself in themes of moving through tumult that feel informed by the challenge to Butler\u2019s nobility and to our notion of the stability of the family bond at the root of Arcade Fire, while the band activity minimizes chances that possible sources of frustration come up. When we hear Butler or Chassagne sing or speak, it is of love and renewed commitment. \u201cIt\u2019s the time of the season,\u201d she whispers in the couples duet \u201cYear of the Snake,\u201d floating a Zombies reference that she quickly weaponizes, \u201cwhen you think about leaving.\u201d Her voice later drops out as Butler croons: \u201cI tried to be good \/ But I\u2019m a real boy \/ My heart\u2019s full of love \/ It\u2019s not made out of wood.\u201d<\/p>\n When Butler shouts into the maelstrom of \u201cAlien Nation\u201d<\/a> that he returns to unnamed enemies (his most fervent objectors being people who have questioned his character) the \u201cpain they would like to or could have caused\u201d him \u201cwith love,\u201d it feels like Elephant is tacitly saying, \u201cWe\u2019re not going away and we\u2019re moving on.\u201d The focus on romance in the lyrics conjures a world where John Lennon drops Double Fantasy right after stepping out on Yoko Ono in the early \u201970s. The healing cart has jumped ahead of the reckoning horse. Arcade Fire wants to hurry back to warming hearts. This flies in the face of tour reports by the Montreal Gazette<\/a> and Toronto Star<\/a> capturing conflicted fans still trying to work out how to feel about the return of the band; one attendee conceded to the former that the current state of affairs is at least \u201cless disturbing than J.K Rowling\u2019s statements\u201d about the trans community. The business-as-usual approach dovetails with a year of acts from Brand New<\/a> to Ryan Adams<\/a> looking to put a wide range of allegations of misconduct in the rearview mirror by giving diehards a show of talent to talk about instead and little else.<\/p>\n Working with Daniel Lanois, who ushered U2 and Peter Gabriel into their most danceable eras after early collaborations with Brian Eno, Arcade Fire forges a grittier and more claustrophobic sound than it did with WE, which tapped Radiohead regular Nigel Godrich to assist with labyrinthine, universalist two-parters. Auditory vastness and global ideas are reined in here. \u201cSnake\u201d and the title track float a slick marriage of roots rock and Pacific Northwest indie aesthetics \u2014 Butler claimed \u201cmystical punk\u201d and Venezuelan folk singer Sim\u00f3n D\u00edaz as inspirations \u2014 but mounting genre experiments offer the grab-bag time displacement of a lunch hour on terrestrial rock radio. It\u2019s all very studious: The dinky thud of the drums sometimes sounds like the band asking the producer for the Durutti Column special<\/a>. The vocal and literary histrionics of \u201cCircle of Trust\u201d aim for the ache of the Cure\u2019s \u201cDisintegration\u201d as the groove leans into bassy, amorous mid-\u201980s New Order<\/a>. A line in \u201cRide or Die\u201d \u2014 \u201cI could die in your arms tonight\u201d \u2014 gets surprisingly close to Cutting Crew. Arcade Fire is no stranger to such musical pockets. But Elephant\u2019s succession of lovey-dovey throwback jams awards too much real estate to sounds of Gen-X wedding receptions and not nearly enough to zeroing in on newer directions. Circling back to the patient build of Funeral\u2019s \u201cRebellion (Lies)\u201d for Elephant closer \u201cStuck in My Head,\u201d which bubbles to a frothy \u201cClean up your heart!,\u201d the collective cruises to a 25th anniversary next year self-consciously retracing its own steps.<\/p>\n Elephant is hopepunk in the same way latter-day Chris Martin is; pastel hippie optics and earnestness that verges on clich\u00e9 filter into songs that are several ticks less strange than what the wardrobe suggests. Dipping into time-tested dance-rock territory gives the album legs, but it\u2019s often songs that drop the new shtick<\/a> that hit hardest. Elephant\u2019s worst track \u2014 \u201cAlien Nation,\u201d which resembles the Music<\/a> or the Top Gear theme<\/a> of the aughts \u2014 trips up in refitting Everything\u2019s Luddite anomie to chunky electro-rock the band doesn\u2019t sell well. The best avoids the pomp and playfulness. \u201cRide or Die\u201d dreams of vanishing into another existence as the rock star says he wouldn\u2019t mind working a nine-to-five as long as the love of his life could come with, his statement of affection flanked by choral echoes and reverb. The Arcade Fire now signaling defensiveness and solitude even in sound design luxuriate in space, and you lose a sense of how many people are in the room and which Hot 100 hits the producer engineered. But simplicity is just as often a liability for this album. The band behind the exhilarating and frustrating polyrhythmic jams on Reflektor and Everything Now loads Elephant with pared down trips to similar realms, dusted in gauzy, pretty noise but often lacking the lyrical and melodic gravitas these songs usually come with.<\/p>\n It feels like the band that wrote \u201cMy Body Is a Cage,\u201d the glum and almost liturgical 2007 track that wormed its way into years of TV placements, boxed itself into an ideological corner where it speaks obliquely through new-wave and new-romantic ballads. The lack of acknowledgement of where things were left with the band after the Butler allegations haunts the album\u2019s highlights and clunkers. The music is drenched in these and other contradictions. Is the sunny, scrappy \u201cI Love Her Shadow\u201d double-dipping in the Chinese-zodiac themes of love and reincarnation in \u201cSnake\u201d when Butler sings, \u201cWe never met but I remember who you are,\u201d or are we left to think about how this sounds like a rock-star pickup line? What changed that got the band fixating on myths of shedding snakes? It\u2019s difficult not to read Butler forgiving naysayers in the butt-rock song \u201cAlien Nation\u201d as anything other than a retort to anyone who expressed mistrust of this band; the gesture lands before an update on how he\u2019s continuing to improve himself. It stings for vocal humanitarian advocates to clam up about misgivings pointed their own way. Even if the band feels like its cards were laid on the table years ago, and that\u2019s why it hasn\u2019t revisited the matter since, pushing a trust-themed<\/a> social-media initiative warranted a check-in on how its stewardship of such spaces evolved in the wake of accusations of abuses of power. Increasingly, it feels like everything on the planet, even \u201cWake Up\u201d and \u201cNo Cars Go,\u201d is coated in the same milky film of unpleasantness, in the dissonance created by papering over a respected figure\u2019s worst qualities to enjoy their best. In the year of the messy comeback tour struggling to distract us from some disconcerting elephant in the room, it\u2019s too bad the surreptitiously uncanceled aren\u2019t using their newfound freedom to be more forthright.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Their business-as-usual approach dovetails with a year of acts from Brand New to Ryan Adams looking to put…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[45616,45617,77,45621,269,45618,45620,6080,16,15,10357,45619],"class_list":{"0":"post-98084","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-album-review","9":"tag-arcade-fire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-misconduct","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-pink-elephant","14":"tag-regine-chassagne","15":"tag-review","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-vulture-homepage-lede","19":"tag-win-butler"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114500641937036928","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}