
‘Everything Now’: Arcade Fire’s slice of Canadian passive-aggression
When I saw Arcade Fire in concert in 2010, I found myself needing to urinate halfway through. But I refused to miss the current song. Or the next one. Or the next. Because every single song Arcade Fire played was absolutely brilliant. Eventually, I settled on missing “Rococo”, and “Rococo” is a decent track. So it pains me to say that, par the spectacular title track, every single song on “Everything Now” is one that I’d voluntarily visit the toilet during at an Arcade Fire concert.
A band always defined by their vibrant passion, Arcade Fire now feel a little… dispassionate. Gone is the yearning for lost years of childhood, the fury with post-9/11 culture and middle America’s relationship with religion. In its place is a patronising disapproval of kids with smartphones and the innate narcissism of SnapChat – Arcade Fire are your nagging grandmother now (see: “Creature Comfort”, “Signs of Life”). And this album isn’t even about Trump: the *significantly* Canadian group has never been as concerned with literal politics as with societal fuck-ups, and “Everything Now” is totally void of anything that would link it to ‘the 2017 moment’. Nobody wants to hear a by-the-numbers anti-Trump record less than me, I assure you, but it makes some of the tracks feel a little dated when they seem to be working around the elephant in the Oval.
“Everything Now” has moments of brilliance. Of course it does – it’s Arcade Fire! That title track, of which I’ve written before, is simply sensational, in a close contest with “Green Light” for 2017's best song. Its thrilling ABBA-esque dancehall spirit is recaptured a bit on “Put Your Money On Me” (the title itself a weird hybrid of ABBA songs), but even this song only kicks into gear midway through. “Infinite Content” is the closest the album gets to the awesome urgency of the best stuff on “The Suburbs”, but it’s less than 2 minutes long. “Electric Blue” sounds like “Rococo”, and the fact that it’s one of the superior tracks on this album is testament to the dip in quality. Primarily, the band are simply using too many whimpering synths instead of the big, joyful instrumentation they built their reputation on. A little experimentation is all well and good, but “Everything Now” is one step too far on an ‘experiment’ they began on “Reflektor”. “Peter Pan” and “Chemistry” are perhaps the two most vapid songs they’ve ever recorded.
Things improve toward the end: after the lyrically-strong “…Money On Me” (If there was a race/A race for your heart/It started before you were born/Above the chloroform sky/Clouds made of ambien), there’s the genuinely moving and movingly genuine “We Don’t Deserve Love”. And the closer, “Everything Now (Continued)”, a somber reimagining of the title track’s banger chorus, is heartbreaking. Arcade Fire are always showing up and breaking my heart; this album does it maybe twice.
“Neon Bible” and “The Suburbs” did it twenty times apiece.

