Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 05/03/07
Label: Mercury

Suggesting as it does the futility of human endeavour and doomed beauty, the extraordinarily potent image of the drowned cathedral continues to outlive its medieval origins. Win Butler and his Arcade Fire crew may not mine this specific myth on their second album, but mentions of deep rivers, rising water levels and dark, roiling seas abound. No surprise, perhaps, given the devastation wrought across their border by Hurricane Katrina. Forget fire, pestilence, famine and the rest, when The End comes, there's clearly little doubt in this band's mind what form it will take.

Sombre their inspirations may be (viz their 2005 debut, "Funeral"), but Arcade Fire fashion from them strikingly uplifting songs, almost transcendent in their giddy euphoria. If, on their first album, Butler and Regine Chassagne tapped their intensely personal experiences of death and disassociation, for the follow-up they've moved into the political and the existential, while retaining the quasi-religious underpinnings of both form (surging, ecclesiastical organ) and content (apocalyptic imagery) that make their music so thrillingly distinctive.

In opener "Black Mirror", Butler mentions surveillance, in the decidedly Springsteen-like "Keep The Car Running", he unpacks the horror of an unknowable future, while the weight of anxiety pressing down on him in the magnificently malevolent "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations" - which features what sounds like a doomed submarine settling on the sea floor - is almost palpable. Butler shifts away from metaphor for "Windowsill", declaring, "don't wanna fight in a holy war, don't want the salesman knocking at my door, don't wanna live in America no more." There are few laughs here then, but "Neon Bible" still causes the spirits to soar even while it points at the gathering gloom, thanks to the band's trademark dynamics (slow-builds to hurtling, gleeful urgency), their unmannered orchestral grandeur and fondness for glittering drama.

A couple of tracks cast a slightly different light on Arcade Fire: "(Antichrist Television Blues)" sounds like an homage to Springsteen, but that's more an accident of vocal similarity than any attempt at blue-collar "reality"; and "Ocean Of Noise" could be The Bad Seeds, had they been reared on mariachi and New Orleans R&B. "No Cars Go" is the album's least satisfying moment, its gothic swagger suggesting that The Killers may well have looked to their Canadian cousins for their recent reinvention

If "Neon Bible" doesn't quite dazzle as "Funeral" did, that's more a measure of the latter album's benchmark brilliance, rather than the inferiority of the former - after all, not even genius can strike the same match twice. Arcade Fire may be deeply troubled by the darkness they see encroaching, but still they burn very brightly indeed.

    by Sharon O'Connell