My Life With Arcade Fire — Pt. 2
This was originally written in the fall of 2013.
Hello, boys and girls. It’s time for the second installment in my series about Arcade Fire, and today I’m going to talk about Neon Bible.
Neon Bible was released in early spring of my sophomore year of high school. I know it seems trite, but let me emphasize that for you — sophomore album, sophomore year. I found a crappy download of it around the official release date and listened to it pretty much every morning on my excruciatingly long bus ride to school.
(Just as a side note, I want to apologize if this is making anyone out there feel old. It’s making me feel old too. But we’re not old! Dead people are old. They’re so old that they couldn’t even stay alive anymore. They were just too old. So their bodies had to shut it down. Someday we’ll all be that old. Wait, this got dark. I need to get out of here.)
Neon Bible, much like my high school self, seems self-consciously dark and brooding in retrospect. The melodramatic tone is established from the very first song, “Black Mirror.” It’s vaguely ominous, with the same lush arrangements that made Funeral so compelling. In a way, the arrangements themselves are to blame for the over-the-top feeling behind the whole album. I mean, “Intervention” starts with an enormous, mind-blowing chord from a church organ. And that was how everything felt at the age of sixteen — as big as the sound coming from a cathedral-sized organ, with all the stops pulled out. I often felt like the world was being especially cruel to me, and that I was bearing up under all of it with almost angelic stoicism. You take what they give you and you keep it inside, sang Win Butler. Win’s the only one who understands me.
It’s an angsty album, there’s no two ways about it. In fact, “Black Waves/Bad Vibrations” is so angsty that I usually skip it. Not even angsty sixteen-year-old bus-riding unloved me could take the line “Stop now before it’s too late/Eating in the ghetto on a hundred-dollar plate/Nothing lasts forever, that’s the way it’s gotta be/There’s a great black wave in the middle of the sea” seriously.
But then amid all of this melodrama is “Ocean of Noise,” which is one of my favorite Arcade Fire songs of all time. It’s something of a slow burner, and while the lyrics still have a tint of exaggerated emotion, it manages to squeeze in perfectly when surrounded by a prominent bass line¹ and subtle guitar. When the song built to its horn-driven crescendo it felt like the doors of my chest were flying open and all my weird permanent teenage heartbreak was melting out. That moment at the end, when all of the standard rock instruments drop out and it’s just strings and horns and woodwinds, all with Regine’s voice floating overhead — that’s the moment that saves this album from itself. It conveys the kind of genuine pain that was inescapable in Funeral, and that lies at the core of every teenager’s gusty sighs.
It’s worth mentioning that this album is also weirdly political, in a way that neither Funeral nor The Suburbs have managed to be. “Antichrist Television Blues” and “Windowsill” articulate the same kind of vague anti-societal feelings I had at sixteen, when I thought the world was such a messed up place but didn’t know much about why.
If you don’t agree with anything that I’ve said about this album so far, listen to “My Body is a Cage.” It’s exemplary of everything I love about this album, and everything that makes me glad I’m not sixteen anymore. And let me be totally clear — Neon Bible might be somewhat sophomoric, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. There’s a cultural tendency to dismiss anything pertaining to teenagers out of hand, but the truth is that it’s a strange and complicated time. I genuinely did feel epically sad and angry a lot of the time, and the weird mix of uncertainty and posturing I found in Neon Bible made me feel like I had a release valve for the pressurized emotions swirling in my head. It was the album I would listen to alone in my room after fighting with my parents. It was the album I would flip to on my iPod during grey bus rides home from high school. That’s a crucial role for an album to fill, and Neon Bible does it perfectly.
¹ Musicians of the world — prominent bass lines are the greatest thing. Never underestimate their power.