Just as dramatic as Arcade Fire’s ascent to indie-rock royalty in the early-to-mid 2010s has been the Canadian band’s commercial and critical decline over the last 10 years. There was once a rigor to Win Butler and Régine Chassagne’s songwriting that seems to have been irrevocably lost, and their seventh studio album, Pink Elephant, plays like two or more stylistically incompatible efforts competing for dominance.
Following an extraneous instrumental opening track, the album proper begins with two lo-fi rock songs, the title track and “Year of the Snake”—an apparent course correction for Arcade Fire after three slickly produced releases in a row. These songs sound like YouTube tutorials on what can be achieved with a single SM57 microphone and basic recording software, but the barebones approach highlights a pleasing slide into a minor-key middle eight on “Pink Elephant,” resolving with a clever lyrical reference to the basis for the song’s title: “Don’t think about pink elephant.” And “Year of the Snake” commits to its musical dance of tension and release with the skill of past Arcade Fire songs like “Ready to Start.”
Starting with “Circle of Trust,” though, the band falls back on the flaccid disco beats and chanted platitudes that have become their default mode since 2013’s Reflektor. There’s a queasy sense of unease evoked by Butler and Chassagne’s murmured vocals, which are barely audible against the motorik pulse of the keyboards. Fragments of overdubbed melody and sampled sound effects are woven throughout, and the lyrics take a turn for the desolate: “I would die for your love/Write your name in the fire in the sky for your love.”
Pink Elephant is the first Arcade Fire album to be released in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct against Butler, and he’s admitted to using social media to contact potential sexual partners among Arcade Fire’s young fanbase. In that light, “I Love Her Shadow” feels remarkably tone-deaf. “I want you to tell me everything ‘bout your hometown and the stars/I wanna make new constellations from your permanent scars/We never met, but I remember who you are,” Butler sings before a long refrain of “She loves me, she loves me not.”
The closing track, “Stuck in My Head,” finds Butler self-diagnosing the causes of his mental health issues. After singing the titular refrain repeatedly over a discordant string crescendo, he admonishes, “Clean up your heart!” A sympathetic reading is that he’s addressing himself from another’s perspective, but the rest of the song doesn’t inspire confidence in Butler’s capacity for self-reflection: “I deify the perfect girl… I’ll make her my world and I’ll put her up on a pedestal.”
Problematic lyrics notwithstanding, a listlessness has crept into Arcade Fire’s songwriting, and the themes with which they’ve previously used to tie their albums together come across as muddled or tacked on here. Thus, Pink Elephant, like 2017’s Everything Now and 2022’s We before it, feels less substantial than their earlier albums. It’s hard to shake the feeling that this is a band struggling to find its way out of the wilderness.
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