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CRITIC REVIEWS
100
The Canadian art-rockers are bigger, bolder and more fearful of the future than ever on their colossal fifth album.
100
The torrent of content we absorb on a daily basis is a topic ripe for art that has been largely been under-explored in music thus far, but Arcade Fire don't do it in sombre and morbid fashion, Everything Now being their most upbeat, joyful album to date.
100
A joyous pop album that depicts a world in tragic freefall.
88
As brainwashing goes, it’s genius—and as a piece of art, Everything Now is not only worthwhile but rather brilliant.
83
Like Everything Now‘s subject matter, Arcade Fire gets a bit excessive — yet their fearlessness has resulted in some of the most ambitious music of their career.
80
Whatever it is you crave, chances are you'll find a taste of it here. Whether forging an escape or a space for reality to hit home, Everything Now is a celebration of, well, everything.
80
While there are enough down moments on Everything Now to make many Arcade Fire fans scream they’ve lost their touch, it’s altogether a much more cohesive and tight record than Reflektor.
80
When ‘Everything Now’ clicks, it’s magical, the band as cohesive and dynamic as ever. When pockets of the record feel more like an inside joke that could take time to cotton onto, there’s a sense that Arcade Fire’s urgent desire for, well, everything now, could be a leap too far.
80
The album also marks a clear and surprising shift in Butler's perspective: Rather than sounding crushed by the weight of the world, he seems more resilient, almost chipper. The result is by far Arcade Fire's most upbeat and easily digestible album to date.
80
More comfortable in their dancing shoes, Arcade Fire have it both ways on Everything Now, zeroing in on our modern malaise while taking inspiration from more concise dance-pop styles.
80
It’s a record that makes maximum yield from competing tensions: old world traditions and new world technology; limitless leisure and endless angst; despair and hope; simple tunes and complex emotions.
80
It’s another big-hearted party album for the end of the world – in the spirit, if not the style, of Gorillaz’s Humanz – and restates Arcade Fire’s rousing, compassionate raison d’être in new iterations.
80
The sound of a band coming back to what they've always done best.
80
Everything Now is at once eclectic and cohesive, whimsical and poignant, clever and smug, and utterly compassionate, and while its satire and willingness to tackle the big issues is what first catches the eye, it’s this compassion and warmth which stays with the listener long after the final notes are played.
5mo
75
When a group takes as much time between releases as Arcade Fire does—and demonstrates such unapologetic ambition—it’s reasonable to expect that its members have been slowly chiseling away at a masterpiece. Instead, Everything Now feels like the simpler record that frontman Win Butler once meant to make with Reflektor, before the project took on a life of its own.
75
At its best, ‘Everything Now’ is soaring, majestic stuff and very hard to resist.
70
Gravitas was always the band’s defining characteristic, and without that some songs are in danger of flying away (‘Peter Pan’, ‘Good God Damn’) no matter how interesting the sounds that underpin them.
70
When it’s good, it’s very, very good – but it’s also flawed. Such is the band’s conviction to capturing their reservations about our on-demand culture, it’s hard not to feel drained by the end.
70
While Reflektor was a more consistent album top to bottom, the peaks on Everything Now are headier.
60
The megaphone-blown intensity that fuelled the band’s greatest underdog anthems is more diffuse here, diluted by an ironic, irreverent tone that renders some songs frivolous.
60
While there is still plenty to love here, Everything Now feels like Arcade Fire's first non-essential album which is a serious matter given their illustrious back-catalogue.
60
They're not back at their best, but on Everything Now, Arcade Fire once again sound like the world-beaters they were on The Suburbs without forgoing the acidity, swagger and scope of Reflektor.
60
The fact that its laudable desire to experiment musically doesn’t always come off isn’t enough to make Everything Now a bad album – there are songs worth hearing and genuinely thrilling music here – but rather a flawed one.
60
Overall, there is just enough on Everything Now to appease fans and attract newcomers with accessible singles, but as an Arcade Fire record, it's unfortunately too inconsistent and ultimately hollow. Arcade Fire sought to make a Big Statement but instead produced one of their least impactful works.
60
For the most part, Everything Now is a massive disappointment, a big stumble in Arcade Fire’s career. It’s their weakest album by far. But there are segments of radiant brilliance that will make you wonder what could have been.
60
The choral baroque-pop of their beginnings may be long gone but the character of Arcade Fire: ambition, epic power and an empathetic consideration for society are still present.
60
It’s a solid album that delivers some decent entries into the band’s growing catalog. But it also feels, in spite of all its work to be the next, wider ring in the Arcade Fire atmosphere, slighter than it should.
60
It’s fleeting and it’s turgid and it’s offensively ornate, but Arcade Fire probably couldn’t care less -- and that’s a wonderful thing.
60
On their latest, Arcade Fire sound like they’ve followed consumer culture’s empty promises to their absolute nadir—and now they can’t find their way back.
60
While Everything Now is not the perfect album, and not without its downfalls, it is an album worth exploring and giving sufficient time to discover.
60
Though it's hard to technically fault these slick songs, the band's charm has slowly dissipated with each album since 2010's The Suburbs; what they've become is a well-oiled machine lacking the heart and soul that made them such a unique joy in the first place.
58
Everything Now finds Arcade Fire in a place they’ve never been. It’s unsubstantial.
56
The “society, man” songs are riddled with cliche, and the love songs are a bore.
55
Throughout the record, they treat the idea that modern living isn’t all it’s cracked up to be as a far more profound insight than it actually is.
50
On ‘Everything Now’, though, that fastidiousness has deserted them, replaced by a minimalism that clearly aims for elegant economy – perhaps inspired by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, whose production fingerprints are most visible here – but more often feels simply unfinished.
50
For the first time in their career, Arcade Fire haven’t made a record; they’ve manufactured one.
50
Everything Now isn’t bad, it’s dull.
50
This is the band as a shell of themselves, an uninspiring slog of half-baked ideas following a "trying-by-not-trying" attitude. The grandiose heights of Funeral seem light-years away.
50
Mostly disposable and practically obligatory, the album shows Arcade Fire confused as to what they want to do next so they use the ideas from Reflektor as a safety blanket.
40
‘Everything Now' feels like the band's first missfire record of their career, with its lack of a focused concept, cohesiveness and heart.
40
Everything Now finds Arcade Fire making a bolder and tighter move in a dance music direction than on Reflektor, but unfortunately it's even more of a mixed bag.
40
They used to be the answer we sought from our fatigue with pop culture and over-saturated mainstream media, but Everything Now is sadly just contributing to it.
40
Arcade Fire sound best when struggling through adversity, presenting underdogs – not struggling under the weight of a concept at the expense of quality control.
40
It’s a salutary reminder of how terrific Arcade Fire can be, yet that mixture of solemnity and wide-eyed wonder is frustratingly scattered here.
30
In Everything Now, Arcade Fire insult our intelligence by assuming that we don’t already feel on some level that there’s something wrong with our society and further demean us by offering an album so thoroughly decadent and self-contradictory that any message it might have had to begin with is lost by the wayside.
20
It’s as of now unconfirmed whether Win Butler and the grow-your-own-muesli gang have seriously pissed off a witch, but every particle of their songwriting talent seems to have magically dissipated. Everything Now never fucks with interest or novelty, and is frequently unlistenable.
I like how they made it loop back around to the beginning at the end as if anybody is ever going to want to listen to this album twice.
NME are the biggest kiss ass reviewers I swear
Edit: I have to be honest with myself, this has grown on me. I think my initial anger was just because I love Arcade Fire and was expecting a top tier album which it clearly isn't. However, apart from tracks 6,7,8, the album really isn't that bad.
After accepting the album for what it is I'm able to enjoy it a lot more. Instead of listening to it from a critical perspective I'm just listening to it as a Arcade Fire fan which I'm okay with.
I don't know anything about music. My response to a piece of music has always been emotional rather than analytical or critical. I don't have the background or technical understanding to explain or talk about music.
This album hits me. Oddly, it reminds me of Kanye West's The Life of Pablo. Like Pablo, it's a work brimming with energy and ideas. Like Pablo, it feels like a record constantly shifting, pivoting, and subverting the listener's shallow expectations of what the artist responsible ... read more
I resolved to revisit this after the absolute slog that was WE and yeah this is still their worst by a landslide. Sure, Put Your Money On Me shines pretty bright and the title track is inoffensive enough, but the rest of Everything Now ranges from the misguided (the weird ska(?) attempt on Chemistry) to outright insulting (Creature Comfort).
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Track List
| 1 | Everything_Now (continued) 0:46 | 69 |
| 2 | Everything Now 5:03 | 89 |
| 3 | Signs of Life 4:36 | 70 |
| 4 | Creature Comfort 4:43 | 71 |
| 5 | Peter Pan 2:48 | 56 |
| 6 | Chemistry 3:37 | 38 |
| 7 | Infinite Content 1:37 | 51 |
| 8 | Infinite_Content 1:41 | 53 |
| 9 | Electric Blue 4:02 | 76 |
| 10 | Good God Damn 3:34 | 55 |
| 11 | Put Your Money on Me 5:53 | 78 |
| 12 | We Don't Deserve Love 6:29 | 78 |
| 13 | Everything Now (continued) 2:22 | 71 |
Total Length: 47 minutes
Year End Lists
| #11 | / | Fopp |
| #16 | / | Gigwise |
| #17 | / | God Is In The TV |
| #17 | / | Les Inrocks |
| #29 | / | NME |
| #49 | / | Dork |
| #50 | / | Double J |
| #50 | / | Louder Than War |
| #85 | / | Piccadilly Records |
| #93 | / | Earbuddy |
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2y
NME logic:
Funeral: 9/10
Neon Bible: 9/10
Suburbs: 9/10
Reflektor: 8/10
Everything Now: 10/10
Funeral: 9/10
Neon Bible: 9/10
Suburbs: 9/10
Reflektor: 8/10
Everything Now: 10/10
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Added on: June 1, 2017