Arcade Fire’s Newest Song Shows The Band At Its Best
“Everything Now” is the perfect blend of accessibility and talent
We live — as bloggers, tweeters, and other purveyors of content love to proclaim—in an era of unprecedented access. Access to videos, movies, books, games, and any other form of media imaginable. This pantheon of information is both blessing and curse, unceasing in its overwhelmingness.
Arcade Fire hits on most of these themes in their newest single, “Everything Now.” The song’s name hits at its meaning plainly, and the lyrics speak to the idea of having everything at once. Both by virtue of its lyrical content and the musical landscape that conveys these words, this is one of the best songs Arcade Fire has written in years.
Early on, Win Butler address the idea of endless content. Surrounded by information, humans can often be overwhelmed. As he sings:
Every inch of space in your head
Is filled up with the things that you read
I guess you’ve got everything now
And every film that you’ve ever seen
Fills the spaces up in your dreams
The beauty of these lines is that they can be taken as either encouraging or discouraging. They can be read as either sarcasm or breathless wonder. Fans of the band know that Arcade Fire tends to fall much closer to sarcasm than wonder. The group’s album The Suburbs was filled with gloomy reflections in suburban America. However, the music seems unfit to accompany such a message, as its sunny and happy energy make these lines seem at least a little ambiguous.
That music is worth mentioning in greater detail. “Everything Now” begins with a pulsing beat, an immediate departure from the band’s more typically dreamy soundscapes. It’s still clearly an Arcade Fire song — the lyrics and nearly every other instrumental element confirm that—but the straight shot of energy that this song creates is an interesting stylistic choice. It’s not quite a “dance” track, but there are elements of that genre here.
Consider the group’s last album, Reflektor. Released in 2013, this album is nothing short of a musical behemoth. The lengths of the first few songs regular stretch over six minutes, and the different tracks meander over different themes and instruments in a way that often seems unstructured and directionless. I enjoyed this album, as I have every one of this group’s projects, but the ambitious length and structure made it more difficult to listen to than some of their earlier efforts. If this album were a book, for example, it would be Moby Dick.
In all fairness though, many of Arcade Fire’s best songs are lengthy ones. I want to be clear with what I’m saying here, which is that the group can tend to lose focus and have songs drag on from time to time, a problem that is often exacerbated by length run times. I don’t think there’s any “sweet spot” in terms of length for a song to be enjoyable, especially because of music’s inherently subjective nature. What I would like to suggest here though, is that this band is immensely talented, and performs best when its songs are the most focused.
I can best illustrate this through some examples. Some of my favorite Arcade Fire songs are “Wake Up” (of course), “No Cars Go,” and “Half Light II (No Celebration).” These songs are all fairly energetic (which probably says more about my taste than the band’s talent), and each progresses steadily from part to part until it ends. “Wake Up” is probably the group’s single most recognizable song. It has found a place in several movies, and is a popular choice at many different events. With a driving guitar line, ethereal vocals, and beautiful melodies, it showcases the best of what Arcade Fire can do.
Most importantly, each of these three songs is is clearly focused around a driving (different from “pulsing,” which I consider to be more electronic)beat, a guitar line, or some other musical element. Each part of the song — from other instrumentals to vocals — contributes to that motif. And the end result is a musically unique group playing a bunch of unconventional instruments that results in some fantastic music.
“Everything Now” does something similar. I previously mentioned that the song starts out with a pulsing beat, followed by more recognizable elements of Arcade Fire songs. It sounds almost nothing like “Wake Up,” but it has a similarly well-defined structure, and is incredibly accessible. In contrast to “Reflektor,” the lead single from their last album that went over seven minutes in length, “Everything Now” is short, simple, and accessible. I like the song “Reflektor” a great deal, but “Everything” is indisputably a better advertisement for an album. If I were trying to convince someone to listen to this band, I would definitely choose “Everything.”
As easy and quick as it is though, “Everything Now” also carries everything else that makes the band great. The lyrics, as I mentioned above, are somewhat ambiguous at points. Like many other Arcade Fire works though, they end in an interesting blend of disillusionment. Consider the last few lines here:
And every room in my house is filled with shit I couldn’t live without
(Everything now!) I need it
(Everything now!) I can’t live without
(Everything now!) I can’t live
(Everything now!)
Every inch of space in my heart is filled with something I’ll never start
I won’t pretend to know authoritatively what the overall message here is, but my best guess is that Butler is speaking entirely in sarcasm right up until the last line. And this line, the end of the song, brims with an honest take on everything that the singer can or cannot live without.
Putting aside this brief exploration of Arcade Fire’s music, lyrics, and history, I can’t recommend this song enough. I’m a somewhat casual fan of this group, but their earlier albums played constantly on my iPod during my high school years and they have undeniable talent. And in truth, these early albums are still some of my favorites.
But I love “Everything Now” and I can’t stop listening to it. It’s one of those songs that I can design a playlist around — a tune so good that it demands its own organized cast to support it. It will still be some time until the accompanying album comes out, but this song bodes well for the final project. I’m all in on this one.
