At the end of July, Arcade Fire released their fifth studio album.
On release, it entered both the UK and US album charts straight at number one. Well regarded as a band who trade in cutting-edge lyrical comment on contemporary culture while simultaneously participating in it, their arena shows sell out within minutes.
With a loyal and large fan base, they’re an influential band making music worthy of closer inspection.
Dancing with despair
In the same way that Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series is now available on Netflix, which proudly advertises that ‘all episodes are available immediately all of the time and whenever you want!’, despite Black Mirror itself being a critique of the infinitely streamable distraction that Netflix stands for, Everything Now is a disco album filled with satirical anthems that make the listener want to dance and despair at the same time.
Steeped with insight into the emptiness of our materialistic culture and threading a clever motif around the theme of infinite content, Everything Now has a lot to say about the current state of humanity.
Title track ‘Everything Now’ summarises the album’s manifesto in the most devastating fashion, as music reminiscent of ABBA plays backing to the chorus: ‘Everything now! I want it/everything now! I can’t live without/everything now.’ The verses explore broken relationships, absent parents, and the widespread attempt to deal with life in a broken world by drowning it out and painting on fake smiles – but even the speakers we depend on to drown things out will break, the song says, and the voice of reason at the end of every verse calls into the situation, ‘stop pretending’.
The final verse reveals what we’re left with – ‘the ashes of everything now’ at the end of the chase to own everything. The pull of our materialistic culture is accurately and convincingly called out for its inadequacy to comfort us, despite its bold and incessant claims.
Quest for pleasure
In ‘Signs of Life’ the focus moves to the hedonistic quest for pleasure and how. once entered into, through its own deficiency it entraps us into a cycle that’s hard to escape from: ‘Looking for signs of life/looking for signs every night/but there’s no signs of life’. And the solution? ‘So we do it again’. In this constant and dissatisfying search for something which will truly satisfy, we find that ‘love is hard/sex is easy’, a distinction much mainstream music would not know to make.
The result of repeatedly looking for satisfaction in all the wrong places is carried through into ‘Creature Comfort’, where ‘we wanna dance but we can’t feel the beat/I’m a liar, don’t doubt my sincerity’. We lose our senses and ourselves in the search.
A frantic one minute and 34 seconds of the phrase ‘infinite content’ being repeated over and over, with the occasional question of whether that makes us ‘infinitely content’ is followed by a track of almost the same name. Running only five seconds longer, and sharing exactly the same set of lyrics, this time it’s accompanied by a traipsing country-inspired track. This motif is the cleverest thing about the album – the form communicates and reinforces the content.
Inability to empathise
On ‘Electric Blue’ the band explores our increasing inability to empathise with each other. With our energies so focussed on how we’re projecting ourselves, especially through the medium of social media, the song dances through the degenerating reality of a habit which the band’s lyrics neither shy away nor exclude themselves from.
The final track is something of a coda laden heavily with meaning, bearing almost the same name as the album’s opening track and ending so abruptly that it’s almost impossible not to return immediately to that first track and listen through the album again: to be trapped in an infinite loop of the album’s content. Incidentally, their upcoming tour in support of the album, covering Europe and the Americas, is entitled ‘Infinite Content’.
Maybe God
Arcade Fire’s lyrics, and the form of the album they’re packaged in, are a devastating analysis of the state of our culture’s values, and what those values are doing to us as humans. Everything Now often does this by taking us to face the reality of death in order to draw out the absurdities of our day-to-day choices which chase after permanent and lasting significance through selfies and parties. In ‘Good God Damn’, we’re pulled from the temporal to the eternal: ‘Maybe there’s a good God/ if he made you/ if he made you’. This album, dressed on the surface in the glitter of vapid disco rhythms, reminds us, on closer inspection, that from dust we came, and to dust we will return.
