Album Review: WE

I think if any band has earned the right to ask that we forgo the context for the sake of the music, then it's Arcade Fire. What fucking baggage they carry for us. That's what happens when your very first album is an anthemic, life-changing, fist-pumping treatise on life and death and WHAT IT ALL MEANS. Funeral is a gift, and to open up any subsequent gifts and compare is unfair to everyone involved.

In other words, fuck anyone who tells you that WE wants to be like Funeral and "kinda gets there but doesn't quite." I say fuck the comparison. I've followed Arcade Fire wherever their bliss takes them, and I rarely feel led astray. Why would I change that now? Funeral is a Top Ten All Time album for me, as I'm sure it is for many of my peers. To make the assumption that the band wants to "return to their previous successes" is doing a great disservice to the band that, well, gave us Funeral.

It could just be that I am more willing than most to forgo my hipster credentials in search of sappy emotions that may read to many as corny or goopy or lame. Fine, Arcade Fire aren't cool/young/hip anymore. So? Lyrics that read like AIM away messages are fine with me, because those away message quotes were specifically chosen as meaningful and deep anyway. Even if no one else thinks they are, I do. I choose this. I choose Arcade Fire.

And it's not like this sounds anything like Funeral Part II anyway. Sure, they're reaching the heights, musically, that they did on Funeral, but it's not like they didn't reach those heights on any of the four albums in between (less so on Everything Now, sure, but fuck, man, talk about underrated). The full and conscious turn they took toward thumping disco/club sounds on Reflektor sticks around, with "Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)" and "Unconditional II (Race and Religion)" absolutely pulsing throughout.

Maybe releasing "The Lightning I" and "The Lightning II" as singles before the album dropped was a mistake, because they represent really the only true return to the energy that Funeral still echoes through our lifetime. It gave critics the excuse to call WE a "return." Well, okay, there's also "End of the Empire IV," which states: "I unsubscribe / fuck Season 5." There's no other way to read that other than a snarky rebuttal to those who hated Arcade Fire's "Season 5" a.k.a. LP5 a.k.a. Everything Now—which, again, was not bad, and actually quite great save for maybe three true and unmistakable clunkers. But yeah, commenting on the public's perception of LP5 isn't doing any favors for the story that every critic seems to be selling about LP6. 

And I'm selling the reverse of that story in this review, which is just as bad, I guess. Feel free to "unsubscribe" if you'd like. But I feel like this is worth talking about. Not just because PoYB doesn't pedal in regurgitating "online discourse," though it's that too (i.e. this isn't sports radio or Twitter, yo). If I felt the same way that everyone else was feeling about WE, then I wouldn't even bother writing the fucking review.

However, it's also worth talking about because Arcade Fire themselves talked about it. Everything Now's whole thing was basically "being online is bad," which seems like a reductive take if you just glance over it. But now that we are past that promotional cycle, and have entered a new one in which "online" people are all plugged into the same opinion that "Arcade Fire is trying to get back to their roots" and are using that ostensible fact that craft wild opinions about it, it all seems a little heavy and dark, and maybe you start to think that "being online is bad" wasn't so off the mark as we all assumed. 

Maybe Arcade Fire wasn't talking about online in general, but specifically their own fans online. Maybe they saw the wolves coming, and were simply asking to not be eaten.

Well, my teeth are away, my stomach is full, and I'm here to listen. Arcade Fire isn't back, because they never left. They're just doing what they've always done. Just so happens that "what they always do" is create some of the best music in history. Fuck the baggage—discard it. Just listen. You know this. You love this. I love it too.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5