Arcade Fire

A review of Arcade Fire's new album 'WE', from the Win Butler and Régine Chassagne-fronted band, their first record since 2017's 'Everything Now,' which was ...

“End of the Empire” is nuclear-grade classic-rock pastiche, a little like a Queen song and a Lennon song and a Neil Young song all at once, somehow.) They are playing to their strengths, literally overloading fans with songs about the power of love and the strength of family. “The Age of Anxiety” is a word about coping mechanisms — “Fight the fever with TV / In the age where nobody sleeps / And the pills do nothing for me / In the age of anxiety” — that feels like a lingering hangover from the previous album both in the effortless balance of rock and dance grooves and in the focus on the strange ways humans process tragedy. “End of the Empire IV (Sagittarius A)” is a superfluous coda that tries to balance religious allusions and references to social media, reaching for profundity but landing better as comedy as Chassagne croons “unsubscribe” while Butler muses about Dante’s Inferno. The same happens when “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid),” a dollop of encouraging life advice that carries the hint of fatherliness, morphs into “Unconditional II (Race & Religion).” The melodies in Chassagne’s verses bear a distracting resemblance to the 1985 Dire Straits and Sting hit “Money for Nothing,” and the chorus (“I’ll be your race and religion / You be my race and religion”) sounds underbaked, its Peter Gabriel backing vocal notwithstanding. It’s great to hear this band behaving as if they have a universal truth of great importance to share with the world, treading into proggier waters and slapboxing with the titans of rock, making the most Beatles-y music of their career. Arcade Fire released the album’s best two-parter as the lead single; the transitions here rarely feel as thrilling as the unexpected leap from folk to punk across “The Lightning I” and “The Lightning II.” “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)” feels like cool if inessential material on the back end of a hit single’s bloated extended mix. WE sells the sentiment so plainly that it may be the most romantic work in the entire Arcade Fire catalogue, from the apocalyptic “Hungry Heart” energy of “End of the Empire” to the commitment in the chorus of “The Lightning I” — “I won’t quit on you / Don’t quit on me” — to the intensity of the title track and closer, which is full of lines you could imagine lovers saying to each other as Mount Vesuvius rained molten death on Pompeii. There are places where the album lays it on a little thick, though. Taking a page from the album’s namesake, Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s influential 1924 book about a totalitarian surveillance state, and David Bowie concept records such as The Man Who Sold the World and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, “End of the Empire I–III” yearns for fulfillment in a dystopian landscape. You don’t come up with “Keep the Car Running” or “The Well and the Lighthouse” unless you were profoundly affected by 1980s radio. Where Everything Now spoke wryly to the lengths we go to in order to feel fulfilled and entertained, WE ponders the inner turbulence we experience in any time of swift upheaval and how to fight the loneliness that animates the fingers scrolling across the miles and miles of posts the band lampooned in “Infinite Content.” WE isn’t any less melodramatic in its execution, but it is much more personal. This tracks: You could slide “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” and “Rebellion (Lies)” into the Killers’s Hot Fuss without interrupting the sequencing. Since cementing their reputation as one of the finest rock groups of the aughts, the Montreal collective has run far and fast from the sound of their classics — that bleeding-heart big-band racket that makes every live performance of Funeral’s “Wake Up” or The Suburbs’ “Ready to Start” crackle with the fervor and electricity of a tent revival and made Neon Bible’s bubbly “No Cars Go” feel like the emotional climax of a Pixar film. For years, Arcade Fire has tussled with what it means to be a big deal.

It's a big month for the Montreal band, who are also set to perform on Saturday Night Live this weekend, and at the Juno Awards on May 15 in Toronto.

This will be the Grammy-winning group’s first tour since 2018, with tickets set to go on sale May 13. It’s a big month for the band, who are also set to perform on Saturday Night Live this weekend, and at the Juno Awards on May 15 in Toronto. Following Friday’s release of their sixth album We, Montreal band Arcade Fire has announced a world tour marked for later this year.

The group, led by married couple Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, originated as a ramshackle ensemble in the early-2000s Montreal music scene, then burst out ...

It’s effective because the idea of the rock band itself, at least as far back as the Beatles, has served as a utopian allegory, a model of a voluntary, noncoercive union that enables the members to be part of a greater whole without giving up their selfhood. Butler has framed it as an album in two parts, the first titled “I,” the initial songs of socio-technological critique, and the second called “We,” which focuses more on family and community. This was the dead end that “progressive” arena rock ran into in the first place, see for example Pink Floyd’s The Wall. But Arcade Fire also holds the escape code. Zamyatin, like George Orwell after him in 1984, presents romantic love as a potential flight vector, as the subversive crack in what the state poses as an absolute contradiction between happiness and freedom. The group’s core audience has moved past the stage of bristling at the band’s seeming separation from what had been invested in them, and they are now ready to settle into a mutually mature homecoming. On We, that topic resurfaces, but this time from a parental perspective, as on the lilting “ Unconditional I (Lookout Kid),” a sweet musical letter to Butler and Chassagne’s 9-year-old son about life’s necessary and ultimately rewarding trials. The worst offender on We, by contrast, is a nine-minute-and-17-second suite that forms a sinkhole in the middle of the album, “End of the Empire I-IV.” (That would be the American Empire, natch.) There, supposedly apocalyptic Beatles-meet-Bowie symphonic gestures meet the refrain, “I unsubscribe.” While that’s not all there is to the song, patches of it sound at once like a tweet about Netflix, a discard from the songbook of the National, and the overreaching of a dad who’s read one too many “big idea” bestsellers. So I’ve always observed them as an outgrowth of a real-life community, rather than looked up to them as the generators of an imagined community to come. By contrast, Pitchfork’s Sam Sodomsky, in his perceptive and not uncritical We review, envisions Arcade Fire as “the same empathetic songwriters who made you cry to your iPod in your childhood bedroom.” To a large degree this seems to be the “more like it” that the comeback talk orbits around. In 2011, Arcade Fire won the Grammy for Album of the Year for the band’s third album, The Suburbs, to which Butler’s first reaction, like much of the general public’s, was “What the hell?” For the balance of the 2010s, like many artists who’ve hit the zenith of their starting trajectory, Arcade Fire began exploring alternate sounds. But neither have any been without such moments: Search out videos of their recent, still-ecstatic live performances, and hear how they incorporate material from Reflektor and Everything Now. (Butler introduced the title track of that album in London the other week by smirking, “Fuck the haters.”) We, meanwhile, includes plenty of continuations of the electronic sounds of those records—most blatantly on “ Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)” and on my favorite song on the album, “ Unconditional II (Race and Religion).” Those textures persist elsewhere here, too, albeit folded into more classic-rock-forward structures, and thereby a bit domesticated. None of this is meant to say We is a bad album.

The legendary Canadian rock band is back. Five years after its last album, Montreal's Arcade Fire is releasing its sixth studio album, We, today.

Most of the brass on the album is performed by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, a historic New Orleans group that Arcade Fire has played with in the past. With lead single "The Lightning I, II," many proclaimed that Arcade Fire, a band that broke out in the early 2000s with its earnest, emotional rock anthems, had returned to its roots after years exploring different sounds. But as we dug into the album more, we discovered more details and complexity to the band's music now. These songs are almost tailor-made as big concert moments, just as fans got a glimpse of during the band's recent, last-minute Coachella set. The album was recorded in New Orleans, El Paso and Mount Desert Island during the pandemic and, as reported two months ago, this will be band member Will Butler's last record with the band. The legendary Canadian rock band is back.

Beck will support across North America, with Feist joining the European dates.

Shortly after announcing WE, co-founder Will Butler revealed that he had left the band. In March, Arcade Fire dropped “ The Lightning I, II,” their first official single in five years. Beck will play an acoustic support set on the North American dates, with Feist supporting in Europe. Find the group’s full schedule below.

Arcade Fire annonce son grand retour avec un nouvel opus et une tournée mondiale ! En France, retrouvez le groupe canadien dans quatre villes dont Paris, ...

Pour couronner le tout, l’artiste canadienne Feist assurera la première partie sur le Vieux Continent. Du côté de l’ouverture de la billetterie, ne loupez pas la mise en vente générale fixée le vendredi 13 mai à 10h. Autrement, préférez les préventes fixées le 12 mai à 10h. Pour découvrir ou redécouvrir Arcade Fire en live, rendez-vous donc le 15 septembre 2022 à l’Accor Arena de Paris. Et n'oubliez pas l'ouverture de la billetterie le 13 mai à 10h.

Le groupe canadien sera de passage à Lille, Paris, Bordeaux, puis Nantes.

Entre ballades folks, mélodies rock et explosion pop, le groupe canadien retourne à ses fondamentaux. En plus de leur retour sur la scène de Coachella et celle ...

Entre ballades folks, mélodies rock et explosion pop, le groupe canadien retourne à ses fondamentaux. Que ce soit les paroles, les messages ou les influences, le groupe a prouvé qu’ils sont toujours aussi doux et résonnent peut-être encore plus fort avec le temps. Après son dernier album, Everything Now, sorti en 2017, qui nous avait déçus, Arcade Fire se régénère enfin avec WE, son nouveau projet sorti ce vendredi.

Le dernier concert est prévu à Toronto en décembre, après des spectacles à Edmonton et Vancouver. Aucune ville québécoise ne fait partie de l'itinéraire du ...

En plus de la sortie de son nouvel album et l’annonce de sa tournée, le groupe doit aussi participer à l’émission américaine Saturday Night Live cette fin de semaine et au gala des prix Juno le 15 mai à Toronto. Le groupe ouvrira le bal à Dublin, en Irlande, en août et parcourra ensuite l’Europe et l’Amérique du Nord. Le dernier concert est prévu à Toronto en décembre, après des spectacles à Edmonton et Vancouver.