Album Review: Arcade Fire, "Neon Bible"

ARCADE FIRE’s breakthrough 2007 record. God, this is awful! Pretentious as fuck, twee, maudlin, vaguely preachy but without ever making eye contact... I just about made it through the album by copious use of the fast-forward button.

I would sum this up as "shy white people music."

So, after  blowing the fuck out of this, I guess my only job left in this review is to explain why they are such critical darlings and sell a shit-ton of records to a certain subset of the human race.

First up, it sounds like the kind of music that succeeded in that particular period (the Harry Potter period) running in a loose pack with THE NATIONAL, BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE, VAMPIRE WEEKEND, SUFJAN STEVENS, etc.  But what was the selling for this sort of thing, as it lacks the raw, visceral musical pleasure that you find in the bands that supposedly inspired this generation like THE CURE, TALKING HEADS, and BOWIE?

Part of the answer is that this sort of thing is a signaller of drab sensitivity for the jaded generation, the Millennials.

Another ingredient is the murky sound and whispery vocals. This serves to create a fake sense of intimacy and parasocialism that that blighted generation was particularly susceptible to. 

And then there’s the passivity thing, with washes of dancey energy and “cinematic builds”—y’know, that thing where the song starts off all restrained, introspective, or even funereal, and gradually, like in album closer "My Body is Cage," more and more elements are layered in—church organ, drums, swelling strings, horns, the kitchen sink, blah, blah, blah—creating a “dramatic” escalation that feels sweeping and emotional to the emotionally underprivileged. 

Grade D

Colin Liddell
Revenge of Riff Raff
12th of January, 2026

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