Day Three hundred and forty six - Put your money on me

Who : Arcade Fire

Album name : Everything Now

Formed : 2001

From : Montreal, Canada

What do they play : Indie rock / chamber pop / art rock / baroque pop / symphonic rock (at least according to Wikipedia)

Release date : July 28, 2017

Why Arcade Fire? God alone knows, I mean, their first three albums proved to be momentous in my life, as I've related. But since then I've not paid much attention to them, so why? Why pursue this lunacy of 'reviewing' their albums? I'm very, very sure it's got nothing to do with me having some difficulty coming up with stuff to write. I certainly cannot be that. Surely not.

And so we come to 'Everything Now', and two things about this record are true : I never listened to the whole record until today, and it's the only record of theirs I do not own. Which is a strange thing, for various reasons, and if 'Reflektor', their previous album, which I really don't love but don't despise either, was one that I actively sought on vinyl, and ended up paying a premium price for it - it was fairly expensive to get one some years back - this one I rarely felt the need to have. That's because the only time I attempted to listen to this album, I stopped halfway through, thought to myself 'what is this shit?', and never ever listened to it again. Good riddance, I always felt.

So I wasn't really looking to today. I knew I'd have to do it, some time or the other, but I did not relish the thought. And so when I pressed play on the record today, and the first half-dozen songs had played, I wanted to give up again. It's all just so... unremarkable. It's got some nice melodies here and there, but it's nothing to write home about, really. I'd even venture to say that some of those first six or seven songs are downright mediocre. It took all I had to continue listening.

And I did feel tempted to stop there and then. If, as usual, the best songs are the ones that come up first in the record, and those were pretty meh, then how good could the other half be? Well, pretty damn good. I'd say they're pretty fucking fabulous, and some of them shot straight to the top of the list of my favourite Arcade Fire songs. From 'Infinite_Content' onwards, and though, eh, I do think that 'Electric Blue' is somewhat bland, everything there is just a banger. The last four tracks, in particular, 'Good God Damn', 'Put Your Money on Me', 'We Don't Deserve Love' and 'Everything Now (Continued)' are just as good as any of their greatest songs from previous records. And 'Infinite_Content' has some melodies that harken back to the whistful, nostalgic sounds of 'The Suburbs', an album which I love to death.

Now, this being said, will I be moved in the future to pick up this record again and listen it start to finish? Probably not. But the songs I singled out are already part of my playlist, so they'll popping up a lot in the future. As a record, I don't think it's such a good one. At least half of it borders on the banal. Then there's the other half that is just outstanding. This would have been a five star EP, for sure, had they released it with just those final few songs. As a record, I'll give three out of five Good God Damns and I'm being pretty fucking generous here.

As a treat, from now on I'll be sharing the playlists for each month. I tried to do it on Spotify, but there's some songs they don't got there, so fuck that. Youtube it is.

[This is the playlist for January.]