Reflektor

Genre jumping aside, it's the patterns as much as the riffs that are beguiling here.

There is so, so much content, so beautifully and flawlessly presented that it can be baffling at times. The Suburbs, to many, was decade-defining music. Reflektor, I feel, through both content and design, will be artist-defining.

They’ve re-affirmed their place as one of the best bands in the world and have created an album that is insightful, emotional, fun and just damn amazing.

They've given us something in the present tense that, these days, feels depressingly unfashionable: An Event--an album that dares to be great, and remarkably succeeds.

This is music that moves the body along with the spirit, a damn fine step in the right direction.

The double-disc, dual volume album that results is one that finds the Canadian seven-piece sounding liberated, from stylistic and budgetary constraints both. [No. 105, p.52]

There’s no lack of stride here, in fact the entire scope of Reflektor and its magnificent way of sucking you into its entire ride is downright remarkable.

The band certainly hasn't left rock behind, but they've found a way to push beyond a sense of exhaustion with the resources that the genre has to offer, while at the same time reflecting on the tenuousness of interpersonal connection in an age of hyper-evolving technology.

Reflektor goes after this eternal, existential tension in masterful strokes and is a significant musical contribution by Arcade Fire, who continue to find ways to tap into universal expressions while making music that's refreshingly topical, infectious and completely their own.

At this point, Win Butler is rock ‘n’ roll’s Christopher Nolan, a hyper-literate artist who crafts reliable, intelligent, and challenging blockbuster events that sweep our minds away. With the 85-minute Reflektor, he’s taken his most creative risks to date and at the cost of simply trusting what he sees, who he knows, and where he wants to go.

Reflektor acts as a vehicle through which the band’s established flair can be refracted into a new polarising, pulverising shape.

Reflektor is closer to turning-point classics such as U2's Achtung Baby and Radiohead's Kid A--a thrilling act of risk and renewal by a band with established commercial appeal and a greater fear of the average, of merely being liked.

Clocking in at an hour and twenty-five minutes, Reflektor drags in parts, though it contains plenty of moments (most often in its uptempo, dynamic first half) that sound ready to breathe life into the middling state of commercial rock in 2013.

As it stands, Reflektor is Arcade Fire’s most diverse and sonically interesting work to date.

It’s not a perfect record, but nothing this ambitious was ever going to be.

Some of the tracks go on longer than necessary, but it’s an excess of generosity.

Reflektor is cleaner, sharper and dancier than anything the band have done before.

There are enough interesting motifs and musical adventuring on Reflektor that the negatives seem inconsequential on the whole.

They’ve recorded another stunning album that’s going to be a bear to follow up.

Reflektor is long and weird and indulgent and deeply committed. It has three to five genuinely great songs; it also wanders off into the filler hinterlands for 20 minutes or so (out of 70).

Big only because Arcade Fire think big, Reflektor stretches stadium rock’s reach in the acts of self-reinvention and revitalisation. Now that’s entertainment.

Arcade Fire's fourth album is pure death disco: a pulsating, electronic work, heavy of theme but light on its feet.

Though a double album of 80 minutes, Reflektor feels shorter than The Suburbs, and better paced.

It is exhaustingly, daringly, bafflingly brilliant, but you might want to lie down in a dark room after listening.

With fourth album Reflektor, their past is documented in vivid detail, delivered with such urgency and bombast it's difficult to look ahead. But look ahead they do, arriving with their fullest and most ambitious record to date.

It's a brave and sometimes baffling album, broaching difficult themes; though faced with a series of such unforgiving electro-sonic maelstroms, one may hanker for the touches of folksy pastoralism that lightened earlier AF albums.

Despite the lulls, the resistance to ending songs, Reflektor lets Arcade Fire shed expectations along with a skin, an act of rejuvenation few at their level manage with conviction. [Nov 2013, p.82]

The juggernauting anthemia that has become their signature is upscaled for Reflektor, a wider-than-widescreen, 70-minute, two-disc odyssey.

Listen closely enough to Reflektor--and give it the patience that clearly went into its recording--and that old Arcade Fire burns. It’s just a different kind of flame.

The finish provides a slow comedown from the buzz of the album’s first half--which by itself ranks with Arcade Fire’s best, most challenging work. The textural experiments of Part 2 can’t keep pace.

Arcade Fire, today's reigning big-message rock band, bring more cynical tidings on their intrepid, uneven, and very long (75 minutes) fourth album, Reflektor.

Reflektor is very well an intellectual triumph, but--in a first for this band--it’s almost never an emotional one.

This timid spike ['Afterlife'] in urgency is short-lived, swallowed whole by closer ‘Supersymmetry’ and its 11 genteel minutes of caressing synth-loops and mental nothingness, completing perfectly what is an utterly tangential statement.

It’s an interesting, intermittently excellent album from a skilled group that could still use a little help in getting out of their own way.

Arcade Fire managed to satisfy divergent interests. Disc one is the hits. Disc two is the weird stuff.

Reflektor hits too many high points to entirely consider it a failure, and despite its convoluted lyrical content and overreaching scope it still crosses the double album finish line with satisfactory results.

Reflektor is as fascinating as it is frustrating, an oddly compelling miasma of big pop moments and empty sonic vistas that offers up a (full-size) snapshot of a band at its commerical peak, trying to establish eye contact from atop a mountain.

Reflektor is not the vintage record the hype would have us believe. But it will, if nothing else, get your feet moving.

While the overall sound is massive, it's become somewhat restricted in tone and texture, most tracks careering towards climaxes of cacophonous synth whines and heavy rock guitars, a narrower palette than on previous albums. [Nov 2013, p.66]

As a whole, there are throwaway tracks ("Porno") and overstayed welcomes (ambiguous anthem "We Exist"), Butler playing roulette with themes: the pains of indie rock ("Normal Person"), star-crossed Greek mythology ("Awful Sound [Oh Eurydice]," "It's Never Over [Oh Orpheus]"), and existential despair ("Afterlife").

It's wildly uneven, and contains more flat-out bellyflops than any of the band's previous works; it's also endlessly fascinating. Far from perfect, it's worthy of heavy exploration.

Reflektor doesn’t contain any actually bad songs (the closest we can peg on the collection would be a small amount of filler material), but the impact of a full listen is one of catchy excitement and impressive pop rock which slowly rolls downhill into the murky sonic depths of the more somber second half without any truly punctuating final moment of the record itself.

It sounds like the work of a band that have plenty of good ideas, but increasingly can't tell them from their bad ones--or won't be told.

While Reflektor isn't so flawed as to strip them of their sash, it's a wobble on a podium, a needless error of judgement that could have been easily avoided had they heeded that other old truism. [Nov 2013, p.100]

It is the Montreal rockers’ most hit-or-miss effort, at once arresting for its audacity and kaleidoscopic swirl of influences but often exhausting with songs that buckle under their own weight.

Nine of the 13 tracks go over the five minute mark, and despite the combined fertility of Arcade Fire and producer James Murphy’s creative minds, very few tracks justify their running times.