The Canadian group regains its rank with an ambitious and cosmic sixth album, “We”.
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It’s the big night at Koko. Ravaed by a fire in January 2020, this deliciously decadent Rococo room, in the London district of Camden, finally reopened on Friday April 29. And this is well worth a Rhapsody in Blue to wait before the concert. Because the prestige of this theater, of which a plaque on the facade recalls that it welcomed in 1972 the final meeting of the “goon show” of the BBC – that is the infernal trio of humorists Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe – earned him the visit of the Canadians Arcade Fire, proclaimed since 2004 Rock Savings, despite the funeral title of their first album, Funeral. Again, the Koko is the background of reunion since the group led by the couple Win Butler-Régine Chassagne had not played on European soil since the summer of 2018. Suffice to say that for the 1,400 spectators, the impatience goes Go under the immense faceted ball which adorns the ceiling of a painted place in the colors of desire: all in red, with gilding and naked caryatids.
Absent for all this time, Arcade Fire has not come empty -handed. The walls of Mornington Crescent, the close metro station, are covered with posters announcing a sixth album, under a heterogeneous eye, with purple and blue iris and the pupil appearing 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 fundamentals rock, pop and folk. Even if Everhything Now (the song), an improbable compromise between the variety of Abba and the Pygée Flute by Francis Bebey, will prevail at the applaudimeter at the Koko. What Win Butler will greet by a revenge “Fuck the Haters!”.
While his predecessor was leaving too many directions, We presents himself as an eschatological album concept in two parts: I and WE, a single lonely and alienated, a more solar and promising plural, “as we would leave the shadow In light, “said Régine Chassagne. Only seven titles 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 there is one, deploys some of the musical fascinations of Arcade Fire: it opens like a tender Lennon-style ballad, Mute in Glamrock 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 were just met”.
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