Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire – Reflektor (2013/2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:17 minutes | 1,56 GB | Genre: Alternative, Indie
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Music CG

With a penchant for theatrical indie anthems, Montreal’s Arcade Fire has amassed a broad international following without compromising its restless artistic vision. For the follow-up to 2010’s GRAMMY®-winning release The Suburbs, the band enlisted the production skills of LCD Soundsystem mastermind James Murphy. At more than seven minutes long, the title track’s hypnotic, futuristic disco groove demonstrates a sparkling chemistry to start AF’s fourth studio endeavor: a double album in concept and in length. Shades of Roxy Music, David Bowie (who’s a fan and lent a vocal to the title track), and Talking Heads continue to color the established Arcade Fire sounds. But there’s a modern grandiosity to the full-on arrangements of “We Exist,” “Here Comes the Night Time,” “Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice),” and “It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus)”—all songs tipping past the five-minute point—that show the married couple of Win Butler and Regine Chassagne are using their mainstream success to expand their creative reach. Concerns of life, love, death, and the afterlife bleed through the multi-octave vocal delivery of husband and wife, but it’s the rhythmic punch that keeps things moving.
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Arcade Fire – Everything Now (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 47:15 minutes | 1,03 GB | Genre: Alternative, Indie
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Columbia

We’ve been waiting four years for this. After the brilliant Reflektor in 2013, Arcade Fire have returned with Everything Now – their fifth album packed with explosive contrasts. For the occasion, the Canadian-American band surrounded themselves with musical geniuses: Thomas Bengalter from Daft Punk, Steve Mackey from Pulp and Geff Barrow from Portishead. The resulting album is transfigured and multifaceted. The synths are fired up and raring to go, the beats stable and assured. Everything Now is the kind of track that’s made to be performed in a stadium. Signs of Life follows in the footsteps of Blondie, the Cure and the Pet Shop Boys, while Electric Blue crosses over into to the Talking Heads’ territory. Recorded for the first time outside of Montreal, Paris and New Orleans, this 12-track album goes deeper than it’s perceptive and melancholic lyrics – it’s orchestrated by a powerful mix of synth-pop, new wave eighties, disco and even americana (such as in the song Put Your Money on Me). We Don’t Deserve Love provides us with a smooth landing to the journey at the end of the album, in which we find Daniel Lanois on the pedal steel guitar. We know one thing for sure – summer this year will be spent indoors, on the dance floor.
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Arcade Fire – WE (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 40:18 minutes | 819 MB | Genre: Indie Rock, Indie Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Columbia

Produced by Nigel Godrich, Win & Régine, and recorded in multiple locales including New Orleans, El Paso and Mount Desert Island, WE paradoxically distills “the longest we’ve ever spent writing, uninterrupted, probably ever” (per the band’s Win Butler) into a concise 40 minute epic –one as much about the forces that threaten to pull us away from the people we love, as it is inspired by the urgent need to overcome them. WE’s cathartic journey follows a definable arc from darkness into light over the course of seven songs divided into two distinct sides –Side “I” channelling the fear and loneliness of isolation, and Side “WE” expressing the joy and power of reconnection.

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