Track Listing

1. Black Mirror
2. Keep The Car Running
3. Neon Bible
4. Intervention
5. Black Wave/Bad Vibrations
6. Ocean Of Noise
7. Well & The Lighthouse, The
8. Antichrist Television Blues
9. Windowsill
10. No Cars Go
11. My Body Is A Cage

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #876 in Music
• Released on: 2007-03-06
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
The second album from Montreal's Arcade Fire exceeds all expectations. With string and orchestral arrangements by two of the band members, "Neon Bible" is full of both half-assed punk rock mistakes and meticulously orchestrated woodwinds. Processed strings and mandolin. Quiet rumbles and loud rumbles. But mostly just eleven songs that the band thinks are really good.

Amazon.com
For their second full-length, the Montreal-based seven-or-eight-piece Arcade Fire show themselves capable of Big Rock, as original, and as potentially marquee-topping as TV on the Radio and Sigur Ros. Regardless, the intentional murkiness of these pleasantly anthemic New Wave dirges makes it sound as if the music has already reverberated through a crowded cement stadium. Named after cult author John Kennedy Toole's first novel, Neon Bible is smart and subtle enough to present itself as a personal discovery for every listener, every word to be pored over by fans (as with those of Tori Amos, Pavement, and Radiohead). Surely, lines like "The sound is not asleep/ It's moving under my feet" have already been scribbled onto the margins of countless textbooks. Such words are delivered with less intensity this time, but no less import. For vocal influences, lead singer Win Butler seems to have traded his '80s Bowie in for an '80s Springsteen, at least on the songs "Antichrist Television Blues" and "Windowsill" (though "Intervention" sounds an awful lot like '80s era Go-Betweens). The kitchen sink arrangements include the use of an Eastern European orchestra, pipe organ, hurdy gurdy, and a military choir. --Mike McGonigal

Customer Reviews

At last, something fresh!
Recently discovered this band and I must say this is something special! At age 48 I have heard so much stuff and over the past years I thought I had just gotten too old (as it would be presumptuous to claim that modern music is going nowhere fast). So for those that listened and still listen to Prefab Sprout, Joy Division and even New Order, for those that enjoyed Echo and the Bunnymen's Heaven Up Here, well, check out these kids from Canada. It might just blow you away. Yes, the production is not always perfect, but these issues are just dwarfed by the great lyrics and the excellent timing of each element in the compositions. If you want to try it out with a download of a song or two, I suggest that you go for:
1. No cars go
2. Keep the car running
3. Antichrist television blues
4. Windowsill
Each of these songs have different elements to them and the lyrics on Windowsill just freaked me out ("you can't forgive what you can't forget")!
Enough already, have to get back to my iPod and this "urgent" music.

Improvements
*Review from a Classic Rock fan
I really felt that this album is much more diverse than Funeral. Whereas Funeral seemed to have an overall sound to it, this album makes it all much more interesting, adding a lot of organ and orchestral pieces. It starts and ends wonderfully, with "Black Mirror" in the beginning setting the stage for what is to come, and ending with "No Cars Go" (featured in Top Gear) and "My Body Is A Cage," which I loved and is my favorite song off the album. The structure of this song alone makes it great, but it is so much more than that, just like with the rest of the album.

Vocals, Check; Arrangements, Check; Instrumentation, Check; Lyrics, Hmmmm.
Funeral sounds like a dance party compared to Neon Bible. All the elements that made Arcade Fire such a blast of fresh air are still firmly in place. What other group does the interplay between vocals and everything-into-the-mix instrumentation nearly as well? It's hard for me to think of one. But I've been hearing white guys sing about how awful things are and the coming apocalypse for pretty much four decades now and it is getting very old. Lyrics like "Mirror, mirror on the wall/Show me where the bombs will fall" (Black Mirror); "A vial of hope, a vial of pain" (Neon Bible), "Every spark of friendship and love/will die without a home" (Intervention) and others like them (and almost every song on Neon Bible offers a new example) have been stale for decades. Trying to be clever by dressing them in allusions to John Kennedy O'Toole does nothing to freshen them. It just shows off, as the one guy who made and makes such sentiments fresh once said, "useless and pointless knowledge."