As the 11 minutes of featherlight synth on closing track ‘Supersymmetry’ floats away like Windows 7 on helium, the death knell sounds over the house Arcade Fire built- for no longer are they the last bastion of classic rock, standing resolute amid the onslaught of the disco-funk pop revolution (thanks, Daft Punk, Robin Thicke et al).
The beauty of Reflektor lies not in the fact that Arcade Fire have duly kept their finger on the pulse of what sells discs- three years after 2010’s The Suburbs landed them atop the Billboard 200 for the first time and winning them a Grammy in the process- but in the way that they have adapted, and organically grown a sound for themselves in the wake of it all.
On title track ‘Reflektor’, they set their stall out boldly and proudly. Creative use of delay and vocal call and response between Win and wife Régine: “I thought I’d found a way to enter/It’s just a Reflektor” underpins what is an excellent concept for an album, which wins it brownie points regardless of its shameless en vogue genre hopping. Everything from setting the album’s name out in voodoo-patterned graffiti in cities around the world, reflecting the album’s use of traditional hypnotic rhythms and a Haitian percussion section, to the depiction of Orpheus and Eurydice on the album cover and its reference to ‘Dante’s Inferno’, is clearly intentional. In giving us so much to decipher and decode, we miss Arcade Fire’s point- that nothing is as it seems, that everything is just a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection…and so on.
The thread of lyrical self-doubt that runs through the minds of Butler’s protagonists establishes itself in ‘We Exist’: “Doubting is fine…/But tell me why they treat me like this” over a smooth 80’s dancefloor groove. The criticism of ‘We Exist’, however, is one that holds true for the majority of songs on this album. Arcade Fire may implore us to lose ourselves in a hall of mirrors, and the song’s slow and steady crescendo of instrumentation achieves this as the bassline motif keeps the listener transfixed. The problem is that it is just too long. So many of the songs on Reflektor suffer from this particular affliction- though they recognised that ‘Flashbulb Eyes’ was a much needed ‘interlude’ between the sprawling progressions of ‘Reflektor’ and ‘We Exist’- the fact that a song just shy of three minutes in length can be seen as an interlude speaks for itself.
We get back on the horse for ‘Here Comes the Night Time’, an aptly Caribbean party anthem. That steel drum melody just occurs too many times- again, it’s too long at 6 and a half minutes. At this point, however, Arcade Fire rip up the script and save themselves from mediocrity. Normality is restored, with no small hint of irony, by ‘Normal Person’- four minutes of classic indie rock down the straight and narrow. Butler’s guitar fizzes with a nervously excited angst, as he muses “If that’s what’s normal now/I don’t wanna know”. Sticking a rock song in at this point is sickeningly deliberate and self aware to the point that you want to slap Butler on the back and applaud the sheer audacity of it all. After ‘Normal Person’, Disc 1 concludes with the extremely Suburbs-esque ‘You Already Know’ and the cheeky glam rock stomp of ‘Joan of Arc’, proving that Arcade Fire can hurtle between genres as frantically as they wish without losing control- the hallmark of a band worthy of the critical acclaim of the likes of Radiohead and Arctic Monkeys. That’s not to say that ‘Reflektor’ is their ‘Kid A’- it’s not that outlandish; it merely rides the crest of the disco wave surely to the top of the Billboard charts and beyond. It’s still brave though.
On Disc 2, it is patently obvious that the strain of writing such a long album is taking its toll on the band’s creativity. It begins with a reprise of ‘Here Comes the Night Time’ (Did it really need that? Really?) and proceeds into a six minute homage to Springsteen (‘Awful Sound’). Where you’d expect the Orpheus/Eurydice story (of which 12 of Disc 2’s minutes are comprised) to be the album’s centrepiece, it plods along in a soup of synthesis that barely holds the attention. ‘Porno’ is better, channelling the brooding synth-pop of Depeche Mode, but if ‘Normal Person’ was Disc 1’s shining light, here it’s surely ‘Afterlife’, where Butler does his best Conor Oberst impression. The lyrics are excellent, both provocative and evocative: “After all the hangers-on are done hanging on/In the dead light of the afterglow”, and the accompanying soundtrack escalates into the best of rousing floor-fillers and festival classics. Ultimately, though,you just can’t shake the feeling that ‘Reflektor’ should have been over about half an hour ago.