Arcade Fire – Neon Bible

This album might make me open the creaky door of my village church after avoiding it for close to four years. The Montreal seven piece led by married pair Win Butler and Regine Chassagne have blown me away with this rich sophomore album filled with glorious recipes of organ, clarinet, violin and accordion. The follow-up to their critically acclaimed 2004 full-length debut Funeral, an album which sinfully I am yet to hear, is a dark and powerful gem.

I think they may very well have created this album simply by combining classics from Joy Division and The Cure with a torn up bible, cathedral choir and a rusty pipe organ in some sort of twisted seance ceremony. I wish I’d been there simply so I could say I hand in making this prophetic and moving piece of art. Admittedly, upon first placing the disc into my CD player I jumped to the tracks ‘Keep The Car Running’ and ‘No Cars Go’ having been impressed by them the few times I’d seen their music videos or blasted them when as they glistened through my radio station surfing on the highway. Although catchy and infectious like the work of the two aforementioned 80s bands, the best was yet to come for my ears. Title track ‘Neon Bible’ floored me the first time I heard it; such sorrow, thoughtfulness and honesty- themes which follow throughout the album. With such beautiful lyricism one truly has to fight pretty hard not to be left moved and questioning relations with the big lord upstairs after a short time listening. ‘A vial of hope and a vial of pain-In the light, they both looked the same’. The very image of a neon bible, like the one depicted on the album cover, leaves one contemplating what our world is coming to.. Check into your chamber at the holiday in and enjoy your complimentary continental breakfast and bible in side table. Religion is becoming more commercial and less personal and sacred.

The organ at the beginning of ‘Intervention’ moves you like the start of so many worship hymns, I swore I was ready to rise from a pew at least a handful times over the course of the record. I mean this in the most powerful and least condescending of ways, the album sends something through your veins. Commenting not only on our relation to the church, the band also looks at our thirst for more in a world of complacency, a hunger for fulfillment- be it material or otherwise. ‘Anti-Christ Television Blues’, another personal favourite, tells of a father living in post 9/11 world still aching for the American dream and fame for his daughter that can ‘sing like a bird in a cage’. Like so many, he seems to really just want to get to heaven some day; ‘But I just gotta’ know if it’s part of your plan to seat my daughters there by your right hand. I know that you’ll do what’s right, Lord for they are the lanterns and you are the light’. Another achy folk driven track appears as the album closes to the end in the form of Windowsill, a tale of a man pleading with God. Just close your eyes and you can see him kneeling and his unkempt bed, unshaven and teary eyed. I wish Johnny Cash was still around simply so he could cover this song.

In closing- buy this album. Any keys I press on this dusty, sweaty keyboard will not suffice in impressing upon you the depth and beauty of this album. It is record of pain, love, faith, hope and despair.

‘You fool, now that you know your end is near
You always fall for what you desire or what you fear’
The Well and the Lighthouse