The Canadian group regains its rank with an ambitious and cosmic sixth album, “WE”.
It’s the big night at Koko. Ravaged by fire in January 2020, this delightfully decadent rococo venue in London’s Camden district finally reopened on Friday 29 April. And it is well worth a Rhapsody in Blue to wait before the concert. Because the prestige of this theatre, of which a plaque on the facade recalls that in 1972 it hosted the last meeting of the BBC’s “Goon Show” – the infernal trio of comedians Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe – earned him a visit from the Canadians Arcade Fire, proclaimed saviors of rock since 2004, despite the funereal title of their first album, Funeral. Here again, the Koko is the setting for a reunion since the group led by the Win Butler-Régine Chassagne couple had not played on European soil since the summer of 2018. Suffice it to say that for the 1,400 spectators, the impatience goes climb under the huge disco ball that adorns the ceiling of a place painted in the colors of desire: all in red, with gilding and bare caryatids.
Absent all this time, Arcade Fire did not come empty-handed. The walls of Mornington Crescent, the nearby tube station, are covered with posters announcing the sixth album, under a heterochromatic eye, with a purple and blue iris and a pupil representing a black hole. Good news for those who had been disoriented by the electro turn of Reflektor (2013) and the dance moods of Everything Now (2017). With WE, Arcade Fire returns to its rock, pop, and folk fundamentals. Even so, Everything Now (the song), an improbable compromise between the variety of ABBA and the pygmy flute of Francis Bebey, will win the applause meter at Koko. What Win Butler will greet with revenge “Fuck the haters! ».
While its predecessor went in too many directions, WE presents itself as an eschatological concept album in two parts: I and WE, a solitary and alienated singular, a more solar and promising plural, “as one would pass from shadow to light “, specifies Régine Chassagne. Seven titles only with, in the center, the grandiose End of the Empire, itself divided into four numbered segments. This tour de force commenting on the decline of the American empire, a Montreal obsession if ever there was one, deploys some of the musical fascinations of Arcade Fire: it opens like a tender Lennon-style ballad, mute to glam rock resuscitating Ziggy Stardust, to return to the fragility of a Neil Young. Régine Chassagne had kept the melody in her head for twenty years, when “Win and I had just met”.