For the Record

Author: Melissa Marshall

It started with the whisper of a spark, slowly leaping from laptop to laptop, airwave to airwave, setting the indie music scene aflame. In the fall of 2004, mourners of a genre which seemed to be suffering from an incurable case of apathy and staleness threw off their bereavement black and slipped on their headphones as Montreal's experimental rock quintet The Arcade Fire ushered in a morning of articulate symphonies and wavering vocals. Funeral, the band's debut, put to rest any early criticism of the group's eccentric mixing of bossa nova and classically tinged rhythms as repeated spins of the virgin disc baptized the five-piece outfit fronted by husband-and-wife team Win Butler and Regine Chassagne into the reflective-rock canon. Funeral may have pumped blood back into the heart of the college music scene while The Decemberists' The Crane Wife and The Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America kept the circulation moving, but in 2007 the dramatic post-rock junkies are jonesin' for a new fix. The Arcade Fire has answered with their highly anticipated March release, Neon Bible.

I don't want to mimic the call of the wild hipster, claiming, "Their first album was better, their first album was better." But Neon Bible, with its over-the-top organ accompaniment and charged religious and political imagery, seems ostentatious when compared to the more low-fi sound of its predecessor. However, despite lacking the indulgent, cathartic nature that made Funeral so comforting, you still have to give the band credit for looking outward instead of inward on Neon Bible. Their sophomore release is concerned more with worldly affairs than familial - targeting the government, the church, the music industry and even human nature.

The opening track's title, "Black Mirror." references the centuries-old device famed to have the power to foretell future events and offer insight into the hearts of men. The song features the line, "Mirror mirror on the wall, show me where them bombs will fall," laced over synth drum beats and sung in a retro-80s style resurrected by such acts as She Wants Revenge and Interpol. Granted Butler's poetry has a tendency to fall flat, but it's always been his impeccable delivery that has given his words their resonance, and when he does miss a note, Jeremy Gara's steady drums and Tim Kingsbury's driving bassline sweep it back into the forward motion of the album.

While the conception of Funeral is often attributed to the influences of Bowie and Byrne, The Arcade Fire took a page from The Killers in their writing of Neon Bible - Butler's low growl, blue-collar references and steady acoustic strumming on "Antichrist Television Blues" play as an obvious reincarnation of Bruce Springsteen. And while the subject matter is more grounded and Butler's voice lower on Neon Bible, there is still an essence of the ethereal which was so poignantly present in Funeral's epic closure, "In the Backseat," tip-toeing among the tracks of the band's follow-up. While the incantatory church organs and Calexico horns dappled throughout the album make you feel the angst of a service, it is the clarion voice of Chassagne that moves the spirit. Her more prominent presence on their sophomore release is certainly praiseworthy, as her contributions to tracks such as "The Well and the Lighthouse" and "Black Wave" float in stark contrast to Butler's heavy-handed singing technique.

The Arcade Fire's daring endeavor ends with "My Body is a Cage," a track whose slow heart-beat melds with a melodramatic melody that permeates the entire disc. While Neon Bible is impressive in its ingenuity and social conscience, the Montreal post-rockers seem to be trapped not by their flesh and blood, but by their high-minded ideal of what a follow-up album is "supposed" to be. Neon Bible may be a slightly lackluster second-coming from a band that shook the industry's foundation in 2004, but you still have to genuflect before their undying efforts to resurrect reflection and creativity in a genre littered with false prophets and iniquitous imitations.