It’s Arcade Fire’s most ambitious, most complex work to date, a monumental work in an era of minor projects: a capital-a Album for the Spotify generation.
There is so, so much content, so beautifully and flawlessly presented that it can be baffling at times. The Suburbs, to many, was decade-defining music. Reflektor, I feel, through both content and design, will be artist-defining.
They've given us something in the present tense that, these days, feels depressingly unfashionable: An Event—an album that dares to be great, and remarkably succeeds.
Stretched across 85+ minutes, its riches can be overwhelming and, given Reflektor’s deceptive complexity, hidden in plain view. But one thing is clear – the album is a product of sheer musical virtuosity, as each subsequent play makes ever apparent.
Reflektor goes after this eternal, existential tension in masterful strokes and is a significant musical contribution by Arcade Fire, who continue to find ways to tap into universal expressions while making music that's refreshingly topical, infectious and completely their own.
Reflektor is closer to turning-point classics such as U2's Achtung Baby and Radiohead's Kid A – a thrilling act of risk and renewal by a band with established commercial appeal and a greater fear of the average, of merely being liked.
As bonkers as it is brave, this sprawling vessel represents as big a sonic reinvigoration as could be expected at the level occupied by the biggest bands in the world – and only possible for a group still too hungry to conform, and tightly wound to settle down.
The band certainly hasn't left rock behind, but they've found a way to push beyond a sense of exhaustion with the resources that the genre has to offer, while at the same time reflecting on the tenuousness of interpersonal connection in an age of hyper-evolving technology.
Clocking in at an hour and twenty-five minutes, "Reflektor" drags in parts, though it contains plenty of moments that sound ready to breathe life into the middling state of commercial rock in 2013.
At this point, Win Butler is rock ‘n’ roll’s Christopher Nolan, a hyper-literate artist who crafts reliable, intelligent, and challenging blockbuster events that sweep our minds away.
The sense of playfulness alongside the severity of ambition shown on Reflektor reeks of a band with an unerring confidence in their own ability.
This is an admirable progression, but by no means perfect one, however, not many bands as big as Arcade Fire could make a similar transition and come out so triumphantly.
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.
It's not a perfect record, but nothing this ambitious was ever going to be. If you've got enough patience though, it's definitely worth the time.
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.
Reflektor is an art rock epic, so dense and intense it feels like a pop soundclash: early Talking Heads, Berlin-period Bowie and Achtung Baby-era U2 on a fast spin cycle.
Arcade Fire's fourth album is pure death disco: a pulsating, electronic work, heavy of theme but light on its feet.
As it stands, Reflektor is Arcade Fire’s most diverse and sonically interesting work to date.
‘Reflektor’ is full of swerving trajectories – so much so that it occasionally feels like channel-hopping.
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.
‘Reflektor’ is cleaner, sharper and dancier than anything the band have done before.
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 shows Arcade Fire in no way diminished, but also not pushing forward much.
With LCD Soundsystem mastermind James Murphy as their new producer, they sound as separatist as they feel.
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?
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 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 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.
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 the sound of an act who, almost uniformly across the album, and for the first time in their careers, are playing as a band.
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 a few goofballs throwing themselves a well-deserved party, present are the requisite anxieties that go hand in hand with playing host.
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 an enjoyable, if unnecessarily overlong, progression.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
mfs will really listen to deathcon and give it a ten and then listen to this and be like “yeah its a little lengthy”
Despite its somewhat long runtime, this album keeps your attention and simply just vibes for the whole time
James Murphy is actually the goat producer, this album is so great and you can hear his sound all over the record.
Another classic AF record. Though the lyrics are a little too on the nose at points it is an incredibly intricate listen full of beautiful moments
I really like Reflektor, so it’s pretty easy to disagree with a lot of the points that people make in regards to not liking it. But man, I love this album.
From the get go, the opening track is phenomenal, it builds and weaves through the structure of the song like butter, crashing in a huge cathartic explosion with cheeky David Bowie backing vocals.
The rest of the album tells different stories of different people, all living in this reflective digital age. “We Exist”, is ... read more
1 | Reflektor 7:33 | 93 |
2 | We Exist 5:43 | 88 |
3 | Flashbulb Eyes 2:42 | 73 |
4 | Here Comes the Night Time 6:30 | 81 |
5 | Normal Person 4:22 | 80 |
6 | You Already Know 3:59 | 78 |
7 | Joan of Arc 5:24 | 80 |
1 | Here Comes the Night Time II 2:51 | 74 |
2 | Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice) 6:13 | 85 |
3 | It's Never Over (Hey Orpheus) 6:42 | 86 |
4 | Porno 6:02 | 81 |
5 | Afterlife 5:52 | 92 |
6 | Supersymmetry 11:16 | 78 |
#2 | / | BBC Radio 6 Music |
#2 | / | Pigeons & Planes |
#2 | / | Slant |
#3 | / | eMusic |
#5 | / | Drowned in Sound |
#5 | / | Rolling Stone |
#5 | / | Under the Radar |
#6 | / | Crack Magazine |
#6 | / | No Ripcord |
#6 | / | Pretty Much Amazing |