Reflektor

‘Reflektor’ is full of swerving trajectories – so much so that it occasionally feels like channel-hopping.

It's a brave and sometimes baffling album, broaching difficult themes; though faced with a series of such unforgiving electro-sonic maelstroms, one may hanker for the touches of folksy pastoralism that lightened earlier AF albums.

Despite the lulls, the resistance to ending songs, Reflektor lets Arcade Fire shed expectations along with a skin, an act of rejuvenation that few at their level manage with such fierce conviction.

Fans craving some kind of thematic hook might be disappointed, but the flow the band achieves from song to song even with the variety of sounds on display should outweigh those concerns. 

This is the new, rejuvenated Arcade Fire; past thrown to one side, only eyes ahead.

It’s this diversity that makes ‘Reflektor’ more than a curios. While it’s too long – so long, in fact, that you’ll forget your own name and nationality – its scale immerses you entirely in Arcade Fire’s universe.

Arcade Fire's fourth album is pure death disco: a pulsating, electronic work, heavy of theme but light on its feet.

Reflektor is long and weird and indulgent and deeply committed. It has three to five genuinely great songs; it also wanders off into the filler hinterlands for 20 minutes or so (out of 70). 

‘Reflektor’ is cleaner, sharper and dancier than anything the band have done before.

As it stands, Reflektor is Arcade Fire’s most diverse and sonically interesting work to date.

Reflektor shows Arcade Fire in no way diminished, but also not pushing forward much.

The very things that keep Arcade Fire’s fourth album, Reflektor, from unmitigated success are the things that eventually make it compelling: What’s a band to do when its ambitious cracks and deliberate detours both drag it down and push it forward?

With LCD Soundsystem mastermind James Murphy as their new producer, they sound as separatist as they feel.

Yes, Reflektor is very well an intellectual triumph, but—in a first for this band—it’s almost never an emotional one.

Reflektor is an admirable effort on the bands part to make a change and adjust to their newfound stardom, but it suffers from a few glaring problems. With some rearranging and skimming the tracks to a single LP, the record would be as classic as anything else the band has released, but ultimately the album falls a little short.

Reflektor is the sound of a few goofballs throwing themselves a well-deserved party, present are the requisite anxieties that go hand in hand with playing host.

While the overall sound is massive, it’s become somewhat restricted in tone and texture, most tracks careering towards climaxes of cacophonous synth whines and heavy rock guitars, a narrower palette than on previous albums.

If only Arcade Fire had eschewed self indulgence, ‘Reflektor’ could have been something very special.

Reflektor is the sound of an act who, almost uniformly across the album, and for the first time in their careers, are playing as a band. 

Reflektor hits too many high points to entirely consider it a failure, and despite its convoluted lyrical content and overreaching scope it still crosses the double album finish line with satisfactory results. 

Reflektor is as fascinating as it is frustrating, an oddly compelling miasma of big pop moments and empty sonic vistas that offers up a (full-size) snapshot of a band at its commerical peak, trying to establish eye contact from atop a mountain.

Reflektor is an artistic gamble from Arcade Fire; a bold statement from a band less intent on competing with their contemporaries and who, instead, focus on doing what they want to do, which this time round seems to be to dance.

As one record listened through end-to-end, Reflektor feels like an unnecessary sprawl. It's wildly uneven, and contains more flat-out bellyflops than any of the band's previous works; it's also endlessly fascinating. 

It's hard not to think that Reflektor would be a great album if Arcade Fire had chosen to scale it down a bit.

Reflektor doesn’t contain any actually bad songs, but the impact of a full listen is one of catchy excitement and impressive pop rock which slowly rolls downhill into the murky sonic depths of the more somber second half without any truly punctuating final moment of the record itself.

While Reflektor isn't so flawed as to strip them of their sash, it's a wobble on a podium, a needless error of judgement that could have been easily avoided had they heeded that other old truism.

It's an enjoyable, if unnecessarily overlong, progression.

For every great moment on the new Arcade Fire record, there's one that falls incredibly short of whatever stylistic mark the band was shooting for. Rather than deliver another cohesive set of songs, Reflektor embarks upon a stylistic hodgepodge full of hits and misses.

Undercooked electronics, impotent rhetoric, too-familiar crescendo-ing structures and an overall feeling that this needs further post-production attention render ‘Reflektor’ an entirely substandard album.

Reflektor could have been many things, but the much-trumpeted involvement of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy results in little that is radical or daring.

That whilst Reflektor isn’t without its merits, the flaws are too ingrained, the cuts in the hide too deep, to be overcome by multiple listens.

What there is is a vast, stomach-churning, nauseating wall of effluence, boring even the most optimistic listener. Win and his cultish winners appear to have run out of anything to say.