Hi, everyone. Anthony Scratchtano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Arcade Fire album, Pink Elephant.

Here we have a new full-length LP from indie rock legends Arcade Fire. It is their seventh full-length studio album, and it arrives during a really difficult and strange time for the band because this record does follow one of the most painfully drab and, I think, underwhelming cycles of the band's career, We, which in itself is a discussion topic because it's really a part of a larger trajectory across the band's discography.

Right now, we're about 20 years out from what you could say is Arcade Fire's creative heyday when they put out early releases such as Funeral and Neon Bible, which really helped define the mainstream indie sound as we know it. But releases the band has put out in recent years have just not really hit with that same urgency, or sometimes have actually brought very lackluster social commentary, like in the case of 2017's Everything Now.

I think even many diehard fans would acknowledge that the band's best stuff has come out years and years ago at this point. However, this is nothing new or even to be ashamed of when it comes to the general shelf life of hip, critically acclaimed music groups. I mean, even if Arcade Fire doesn't have another "The Suburbs" in them, at the very least, they can lay claim to the credentials that come with being indie veterans with a legitimate rock legacy.

But even that was sullied when the band's frontman, Win Butler, was hit with multiple sexual misconduct allegations in the summer of 2022. Now, these are claims that the band has denied in part, saying any encounters that happened were totally consensual. But even that is an unfortunate and bombshell admission for the group, considering any encounters would have been extramarital due to Win Butler and another key member of the band, Régine Chassagne, being married. Their creative voices have always been foundational to Arcade Fire's music.

There's no Arcade Fire without their long-standing personal and musical connection, which puts Pink Elephant again in a strange place, with bad decisions, personal tensions, and waning popularity, all threatening the existence of the band. But they still mounted a pretty quick return with this new album here just a few years down the road, with help, believe it or not, from production legend Daniel Lanois, who's obviously worked on classic records with the likes of U2, Brian Eno, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, etc.

However, don't let that or the thematic and lyrical directions of the songs on this album fool you. I still think Pink Elephant is probably Arcade Fire's most underwhelming, most unambitious, and most unimpressive album yet. Sure, while on the surface, there are a lot of questions and curiosities surrounding the sound of this album and the context around it... For example, there are a few unexpected synth odysseys strewn about the tracklist that have Lanois' fingerprints all over them. There's also a lot of songs on this record about change, about feeling like you're in love for the first time, about really being committed to a relationship about working out your baggage and cleaning out the mess in your head, in your heart, in your bedroom, in your car.

Even if all of these feelings and statements are sincere on some level, it doesn't prevent them in the context of this record from feeling like a manipulative performance meant to make us the audience that is aware of Arcade Fire, not just as a musical force, but as a band with real people in it. Yeah, it just feels like so many of the songs on this record want to assure me things are okay when honestly, I feel like the true effect of these songs is just that they're drawing more attention to what has made the past couple of years so turbulent for the band instead.

For example, Win Butler's total vocal meltdown at the very end of the album does not distract from the fact that this doesn't really sound like an Arcade Fire album so much as it sounds like a Win and Regine recording on a shoestring budget in their living room. Even with the tacked-on intergalactic synth layers taking up way more space than they should throughout much of this LP.

Sometimes these synthesizers leave tracks like "Alienation" sounding like a near novelty song with goofy robot vocal effects, too. Not that Win Butler's leads that sound like it's being recorded through a distorted drive-through speaker sounds much better. But yeah, pretty much everything on this track goes down very bitter with the very on-the-nose social commentary in the lyrics that somehow makes the writing on everything now sound subtle by comparison. I'm digressing a bit too much.

Look, it seems like in a way, Arcade Fire's mission on this record is to make fans feel like things are back on track. But if anything is really going to put the band back on track, in my mind, it would be like an ornate display, thrilling and passionate songs, great performances.

What will not assure me the band is back on track is a three-minute progressive synth odyssey at the start of the record. What also will not assure me is just a drab pacing and lifeless guitars on the title track. What also will not assure me are the sloppily played synthesizers blaring over everything else on the song "I Love Her Shadow". Not to mention all the basic beats throughout the entirety of this record, too.

Again, I'm blown away by just how flat and rickety and skeletal and just colorless a lot of the production on this LP is, too. I mean, even if the music and lyrics on this record are totally on the level and are genuinely reflective of some serious real change in win and the band that eventually sees things being in a better spot in the future, okay, that's good – but fully on the level or not, Pink Elephant just makes me feel like I'm sitting through a bunch of songs that are trying to make up for something, or at the very least, are putting out thoughts and feelings that are maybe better set for a therapy session or two or 20.

It just feels a bit too weirdly parasocial to be audience to all of this, especially when the band's continued success is riding on the message behind a lot of these songs being received and being taken seriously and being seen as sincere, which, I don't know, personally It is a bit tough for me when I hear songs on this album ending with refrains of, 'She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not. Also when screaming, just trying to will himself to get his shit together at the very end of the record.

Again, if these feelings are all genuine, that's fine and that's good. It's just painfully awkward to have to sit through them, which is why I'm feeling a light to decent, two, on this LP.

Anthony Fantano, Arcade Fire, Forever.