Arcade Fire’s new album, Everything Now, is guilty of its own critiques

Arcade Fire released their fifth album, Everything Now, on Friday. As an indie rock album in 2017, it’s fine; as an Arcade Fire album, it comes up short.

The most fatal flaw of Arcade Fire’s Everything Now is that it’s too much of the moment.

The fact that the album seems to be, first and foremost, concerned with its danceability is not necessarily a surprise. After blowing the indie rock community away with 2004’s Funeral, which was firmly rooted in rock with pop/dance elements, Arcade Fire embraced groovy synth beats hard in 2013’s Reflektor. So, in some ways, Everything Now is a logical follow-up to that.

But for all its hand-wringing about how empty our digital, social-media-driven culture is, Everything Now feels like an album that was produced with one purpose in mind: to be performed at festivals for the very people it purports to pity (or criticizes; it’s hard to tell) to dance to mindlessly.

That makes a lot of sense when you realize that the album is produced in part by Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk and Steve Mackey of Pulp.

As they have done for previous records, Arcade Fire hit the Internet with a steady stream of viral marketing satire leading up to the album’s release, including a dystopian Twitter account named Everything Now Content Division (@EverythingNowCo) that interacts earnestly with other brands.

But most notably, Arcade Fire preceded the release of Everything Now with a fake review on www.stereoyum.com (a parody of Stereogum) presumably lampooning the pretentiousness of reviews that drop the same day as the album but purporting to deliver sweeping concrete judgments.

Titled “Premature Premature Evaluation: Arcade Fire Everything Now,” the article does what any outwardly confident but inwardly self-conscious (read:human) person would: points out its own flaws before others can to remove their power.

"What, exactly, will our Premature Evaluation look like? It’s a little too early to say definitively. It’s likely, though, that we’ll compare Everything Now unfavorably to both Funeral and The Suburbs, while calling it a bounceback after Reflektor. We’ll probably spend at least a paragraph talking about the marketing campaign that has accompanied Everything Now—the logos, the corporate-speak, the Twitter account—saying that we get the joke, and maybe even noting that music sites and features like Premature Evaluation (and the new Premature Premature Evaluation) are all part of the same culture-marketing ecosystem."

Nine paragraphs in, I’ve won Arcade Fire’s derisive parody bingo.

• Comparing Everything Now unfavorably to Funeral: check.
• Calling Everything Now a bounceback to Reflektor: check.
• Discussing the album’s tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign: check.
• Examining the impact that Bangalter and Mackey had on the album: check.
• Releasing a review the same day the album dropped: check.

But just because Arcade Fire predicted some of the responses their new album would elicit doesn’t make them ring any less true.

It’s easy to deride the “culture-marketing ecosystem” in which music sites exist; but why make music at all? How much of it is to communicate ideas and create art? How much of it is to connect with listeners?

And how much of it is to make money?

There’s something inherently sad about Arcade Fire’s creation of an album and corresponding marketing campaign that, admirably, tries to disassemble the mindless consumerism of the 2010s while at the same time offering itself up as a sacrifice to it.

And that consumerism? It’s not just of material goods; we’ve gone beyond capitalism here.

What Arcade Fire is really concerned with in 2017 is the “infinite content” of the digital age, one in which the Internet promises a never-ending stream of subject matter by cannibalizing itself.

The same idea is packaged over and over and presented as new #content until, as the titular track “Everything Now” indicates, “Every inch of space in your head / Is filled up with the things that you read / I guess you’ve got everything now.”

While the lyrics on that track are perhaps the best the album has to offer, the persistently upbeat piano melody feels like something created in a lab for Lollapalooza based on current trends. It is, in a word, empty.

This idea comes across somewhat brilliantly in two tracks that follow one another, titled “Infinite Content” and “Infinite_Content.”

The lyrics are identical on both, but they are entirely different songs.

The first iteration is a distortion-fueled punk intonation reminiscent of The Ramones. It’s completely derivative, and I love it. Then, jarringly, “Infinite_Content” wipes the slate clean and starts over, jarringly, as twangy folk ditty, reinventing itself as brand-new—you guessed it—content.

And maybe that’s the point. Do I really want to judge new Arcade Fire music on its own merits—and do the work that comes along with that, over many months and many re-listens? Or do I just want them to, impossibly, keep creating “Wake Up” over and over again?

I can’t say that I disagree with many of the social critiques Arcade Fire raises on Everything Now. The lyrics are, as always, thought-provoking and significant.

Next: VMA nominations: MTV keeps the genderless awards coming and we’re into it

I just wish the music itself lived up to the high standard created for the band not by the “culture-marketing ecosystem,” but by their own previous triumphs.