In every person’s life, there comes a point at which lines must be drawn in the sand. Sometimes this stems from conscious decisions, such as choosing a college or enlisting in the military; other times things fall into place through pure coincidences, like meeting the love of your life after accidentally hitting her with your car. These events are the ones that change your future forever, for better or worse.
The lifespans of contemporary music acts work in much the same way. While the industry can forgive one bad album if it’s quickly followed by several good ones, it usually won’t give much respect to a band that follows up an earth-shattering debut with 12 atrocities.
For Radiohead, 1997’s OK Computer solidified its musical credibility. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Jet’s Shaka Rock (2009) made sure anyone still listening to the band would stop immediately. For the Canada-based Arcade Fire, it was 2010’s The Suburbs that elevated the band to the threshold of music’s equivalent to Mount Olympus.
As the band’s third LP, this wasn’t Arcade Fire’s first good album — it wasn’t even their first great one. That’s because the previous two, Funeral (2004) and Neon Bible (2007), received Metacritic scores of 90 and 87 respectively — in other words, “universal acclaim.”
Under these circumstances, many bands would have followed with a flop. I’s nearly impossible for a group to pump out three landmark albums in a row at the start of its career, yet that’s exactly what Arcade Fire did. The Suburbs proved the band wasn’t headed down the path of groundless sonic additions that some thought Neon Bible indicated. Instead, it developed an album of layered euphonic simplicity with a deep-rooted knowledge that its sound was only working if it heightened the theme of wanting something — anything — just out of reach.
Leading up to the release of The Suburbs, Arcade Fire finally had the platform to change the world, and it did. It went from being the band a few cultured suburban kids bragged about knowing to the one everyone wanted to pretend they listened to. The record peaked at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and won a Grammy for Album of the Year. Strangely enough, though, the biggest turning point came after this success, when nothing changed at all.
In the years before The Suburbs, Arcade Fire was already making the indie band image iconic. It bought a church in 2006, transformed it into a studio and recorded music that it released on its independent record label. This is all fairly indie. With the combination of critical and commercial success found with The Suburbs, Arcade Fire became the elected representatives of this generation’s version of sticking it to the man. No corporate buy-offs, no unnecessary egos, just music. Why should it change for anyone else?
So with next week’s release of its fourth album, Reflektor, don’t expect anything different. It’s clear by now the band is running on its own terms, impervious to the corrupting nature of relative fame. It seems it might have finally found a way to balance success and art. Call it bizarre, but Arcade Fire is one of the most successful honest-to-imagination groups in the past 15 years, as well as the one most closely resembling a regimented factory (one album of mythical proportions released every three years).
Is that even possible? Had The Suburbs been a letdown, the band could’ve been written off as yet another flash in the pan. But because it wasn’t, we have to accept what we’ve seen: Arcade Fire is a beast entirely of its own. With them, everything is possible, and nothing is the way it used to be.
