Reflektor a stirring, yet upbeat, examination of modern life

Arcade Fire

Reflektor

Merge Records

Grade: A

Sounds like: What life would be like without the Internet

On the night of the release of their spectacular fourth album, Reflektor, Arcade Fire played a special show via an MTV-owned interactive marketing tool called “The Music Experiment,” where bands play special shows for crowds willing to follow a series of clues via social media.

They performed on top of a Los Angeles building while the ground-level crowd, aptly dressed as reflectors, danced and reveled in the exclusive experience. Midway through the performance, the crowd started chanting, “Come down!” a request that frontman Win Butler brushed off by diving right into the silencing and infectious drumbeat of The Suburbs’ standout track, “Sprawl.”

Arcade Fire’s larger-than-life ethos is ingrained in every move they’ve made in their 12-year career. From their early David Bowie endorsement to the stadium-ready sound of 2004’s Funeral, the Grammy Award winners have always been primarily concerned with big, overarching questions. On Reflektor, the questions are big, but accessible, making it their most fully realized record to date — which is saying a lot.

The album starts with the dance-ready single “Reflektor,” a seven-minute affair that immediately sets the record apart from the band’s previous releases. This departure partly comes from the addition of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy at the production helm. The immediately groovy track introduces the album’s ideological center: a reference to a Soren Kierkegaard essay about the reflective age.

The album’s focus is an earnest question of existence, the type of question that religion poses (fitting, as Butler studied religion and philosophy in college), and the type of question that Butler and many others would say isn’t being asked much anymore.

“I thought I found the connector./ It’s just a reflector,” Butler howls on the title track.

The philosophical crux of the record comes from a trip the band made to Haiti, the birthplace of Arcade Fire vocalist and wife of Butler, Regine Chassagne. Butler told Rolling Stone that the experience altered his way of perceiving the world.

“There’s this whole inversion of society that happens. For a lot of my friends and people that I grew up with, the only time you ever really feel comfortable dancing is if you’re with only your best friends and you’re really drunk. You know what I mean — feeling less of a break between the spirit and the body, and sex and death not being completely unrelated. [You] just kind of feel like a more whole person, I guess,” he said in reference to attending Haiti’s annual Carnival celebration.

The most obvious display of Haiti’s sonic influence on the album is one of its standout tracks, “Here Comes the Night Time,” which makes use of a syncopated drum pattern and lullaby organ melody. The song unfolds like being dropped in the center of the Carnival festival, with Butler appearing next to you, grinning as he places a mask on your head and ushers you forward in dance. Yet the song’s content is a reference to the still-staggering levels of poverty that leave most Haitian cities, including the capital of Port-au-Prince, in total darkness as night falls.

These influences are important in context of Arcade Fire’s method of distribution for the release. As a double album, this might be one of the last large-scale forays into physical media before online streaming and downloadable content completely alter the creative landscape (See: Youtube Awards). Reflektor’s critique of the modern age isn’t preachy, though — it’s not even particularly sad.

The album closes with “Afterlife” and “Simple Symmetry,” two songs that, despite questioning humanity’s innate capacity for compassion, are actually quite hopeful. Midway through the former track, it’s impossible not to feel an unadulterated sense of “togetherness.”

“I’ve gotta know, can we work it out?/ Just scream and shout, till we work it out” Butler cries on the album’s second-to-last track.

The genuineness of the whole album is striking. Kierkegaard’s reflection posed the idea that you derive your individuality from imitating the people around you. For Kierkegaard, reflection is a leveling mechanism for generating your identity solely by imitating others. In an age of flashbulb eyes capturing the minutiae of daily existence, this critique is haunting, but The Reflektors — Arcade Fire’s new touring moniker — aren’t fazed. They want their fans to look up not at a reflection, but instead at the glaring light of our mirrors being pointed in the same direction.