Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler was starting to doubt that his alt-rock group was a great band. Then the scathing reviews for “Everything Now,” the band’s latest album, rolled in.
“Arcade Fire Is Finally, Officially Too Much,” read a review from The Ringer, an online culture blog. “Arcade Fire’s ‘Everything Now’ Is a Deeply Cynical, Joyless Album,” read another. One listicle trumpeted the “10 most embarrassing lyrics from the new Arcade Fire album.”
Ever the nonconformist, Butler was relieved.
“Oh, thank God,” Butler, 37, said during a recent phone call from a tour stop in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. “If critics liked all these records, we’re doing something wrong.”
Of course, this critical crusade has turned into a spectacle — one the band has met head on. It’s no mistake that Arcade Fire’s in-the-round show at Denver’s Pepsi Center on Oct. 25 is staged in a boxing ring.
But if bad press is peace of mind, Butler has been waiting to exhale. Until “Everything Now,” the critical consensus has hailed each Arcade Fire album as a stroke of genius. Flush with big ideas and adorned with microscopic detail, the band has a knack for–unearthing uneasy sentiments that feel both timeless and hopelessly 21st century. In other words, the albums were ready-made for writers’ praise — even as—its hurdy-gurdy-propelled songs launched over the public’s head.
The band’s latest effort is still a heady commentary but, this time, Butler aimed a few degrees lower. Once critical darlings, “Everything Now” would be an album of the people.
That said, the album doesn’t abandon the band’s ambitious ideas. As its commercial catchphrase of a title suggests, “Everything Now” hangs together conceptually as a lash against modern consumer culture. The internet has turned us into content zombies, it pleads, allowing conveniences to suck our time on Earth that could otherwise be spent making love and music.–
To buoy this idea, Arcade Fire launched an extravagant online campaign. Thumbing its nose at the internet marketing machine, it advertised–$109 Arcade Fire-branded—fidget spinners, released a “Pop-Up Video” version of one of its music videos, and skewered the media with fake news stories.
Crucially, the latter included a satirical review of the album, as written by someone who had only heard four of its tracks. The scathing proto-assessment used critical platitudes to approximate what its readers should think about the album, hitting at the media’s priority of being first over being insightful. “We’ll mention the band’s respect for the album as a form, not just a collection of songs,” one line reads, “while also noting that that respect is somewhat lame and pretentious, evoking as it does the specter of progressive rock.”
As happens so often nowadays, that irony calcified into reality. That hasty and harsh album review was only the first of many, and.at least one of the band’s–fake news stories was picked up the by mainstream press –—for example, in The National Post, no less, one of Canada’s major newspapers.
“It wasn’t triumphant, like, ‘Yay! We proved our point,” Butler said of the media campaign. “It was like, ‘Wow. This is super depressing.’ ”
If that weren’t enough, the media campaign overshadowed the music in chatter about “Everything Now.” The songs were written off as jingles to low-brow satire, too simple to be effective.
The latter complaint wasn’t an issue to the band members. In fact, it was by design. Butler saw The Beatles’ Paul McCartney perform solo for the first time recently. In the Liverpudlian’s three-hour set, one song made Butler jealous: “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” All around him, thousands of people started singing its gibberish chorus.
“What a perfect song,” Butler said. “It’s about nothing, and he had 50,000 people singing along. It’s like a (expletive) magic trick.”
Butler wanted to capture some of that magic on “Everything Now.”
“Not everything you do has to be, ‘This is the meaning of the world encapsulated in three minutes,’ ” Butler said.
After all, a critic’s pick and the people’s choice are often at odds with one another. In the 1970s, Butler pointed out, rock critics hailed progressive outfit Emerson, Lake and Palmer as essential rock pioneers. The band is still respected by those who know music, but it’s a footnote in the scheme of the four decades that have since passed.
“People listen to Abba,” Butler said. “They listen to the Bee Gees.”
Butler’s new home in New Orleans also inspired the album’s sound. Butler spent a lot of time listening to its community-centric radio station, WWOZ, “maybe the greatest radio station in America,” as he called it. The station mixes a roux of funk, zydeco, disco and other quirky genres into a day’s worth of listening.
“That’s the soup we were swimming in,” Butler said.
That gave rise to songs like “Everything Now,” a roller-rink-ready disco jaunt that immediately recalls Abba. It’s the poppiest song the band has cut in its 16-year history. And it’s paid dividends: The single charted higher than any of the band’s other tracks on Billboard’s Rock Airplay and Alternative Songs charts.
“Chemistry,” a straight-ahead love song that marches along to the horn stabs of a New Orleans second-line parade, was another result of this populist slant. It’s fiercely simple by the standards of a band that wrote an album about the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice set to Hatian kompa music.
Of all the album’s songs, critics put “Chemistry” against the wall earliest and most often. “This Is the Worst Arcade Fire Song Ever,” read one headline. Publications tore into its uncomplicated lyrics, reggae rhythm and what was interpreted as an attempt at rap, a claim Butler has repeatedly disputed.
But like “Everything Now,” Butler saw “Chemistry” connect with people in an unprecedented way. In October, friend and music video director David Wilson sent Butler a video of a dance routine set to “Chemistry” at Los Angeles’ Akbar during an edition of the city’s well-regarded Full Frontal Disco dance series.
“There’s no other record we’ve made that would have happened with,” Butler said.
The album’s commercial success is ironic given the anti-establishment undertones that rumble throughout “Everything Now.” But that middle finger is pointed in the mirror as much as at the corporate powers that be. The album strikes out against the cycle of “Infinite Content” that consumers are beholden to while admitting the band itself is complicit. “Everything Now” is content, running along the same curling lemniscate as the cellphone video games, listicles and social media it’s at odds with — or, rather, competing against.
If that sounds exhausting, Butler might agree. The frontman has hinted that his beloved indie rock band could soon step off the content treadmill. In 2010, he told Spin that rock “is a young man’s game,” predicting the band wouldn’t be together “in a decade.” He echoed that sentiment in a podcast interview with The Ringer a few weeks ago. “This might be the last show of this magnitude we do for a very long time,” he said, “so if people are curious to see what our band’s like … I would say, check us out now.”
Nothing is certain, Butler conceded. But the band is in fine form. It’s playing as well as it ever has, he said, and still considers Arcade Fire “one of the better rock bands in the world.”
More importantly, thanks to taking a chance on a new sound, the band is still gaining new fans. The new album has caught fire outside of the United States, Butler said, taking them through the arenas of Europe and, for the first time in the band’s history, a tour of Latin America.
These are the spoils of railing against contentment. If nothing else, “Everything Now” has something to say about that.
“When people have a lot of preconceived notions about what you are, its hard to get them to (care),” Butler said. “If you don’t push yourself, I’d rather not do it at all. We’re still pushing extremely hard.”
Arcade Fire will play Denver’s Pepsi Center on Oct. 25. Colombia’s Bomba Est–reo will open the show. Tickets are $26-$275 and on sale now via—altitudetickets.com.
