ARCADE FIRE

Neon Bible

(Merge)

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Neon Bible is a haunted record. Arcade Fire have once again constructed an immersive realm within a collection of songs, but where Funeral explored a whimsically snowed-over old city, Neon Bible hits the homeless concrete and oceanic dusk at the world's end. These songs are shadows of life, populated by tragically banal authority figures (soldiers, border guards, salesmen, MTV) but also imbued with foreboding magic. This album, even more than Funeral, makes ordinary sadness and hurt feel epic and otherworldly. There is, as has been widely observed, a shade of Bruce Springsteen's folk-song-as-arena-rock alchemy to Neon Bible, but where the Boss deals in frank industrial realism, Win Butler and family spin vague, symbolic fairy tales.

Musically, this album mostly improves upon the band's already considerable strengths, notably combining trembling acoustic rock with orchestral bombast. The band's shambling symphonic stomps and shouted choruses are still here, but they're joined by the ghost march of the title track and the fevered folk of "Windowsill" and "(Antichrist Television Blues)." "No Cars Go," an old favorite from the band's self-titled tour EP, feels out of place amid these songs, a holdover from a more hopeful period that doesn't benefit any from its glossy rerecording.

Lyrically, Bible is far more stark and joyless than its predecessor. Songs lament meaningless toil, dead-end downtowns, and unfulfilled faith. The album's central line pronounces, "Not much chance of survival if the neon bible's right." But occasionally, on songs like "The Well and the Lighthouse" or "Ocean of Noise," a kind of romantic millennialism lends the doom and gloom a touch of lightly bruised Narnian/Christian fantasy.

Funeral was occasionally ecstatic in its celebration of life in death—more of a wake, really. Neon Bible reads like a wearied resignation to fate, but its hopelessness is every bit as enthralling. ERIC GRANDY

KLAXONS

Myths of the Near Future

(Modular)

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Forget what you've heard about Klaxons. They're not obsessed with the ecstatic myths of the near-past; they're just a book-smart (from Thomas Pynchon to KLF's The Manual) young band that happened to hit upon a hot aesthetic for 2007. Myths of the Near Future has more pianos than synths, guitars rather than 303s, and live drums—with nary a cowbell or handclap—instead of drum machines. The songs have verses and choruses and lyrics and everything. Their cover of an old house song (Grace's "It's Not Over Yet") reimagines it as a swaying, distorted ballad. Even the critically hysterical NME has begun to properly refer to them as a rock band. So, new rave is dead, long live new rave—and let's get on with it, shall we?

The album opens with a distorted breakbeat on "Two Receivers," but that dance-music signifier soon gives way to grand, echoing pianos and falsettos (the same driving forces of their space odyssey "Golden Skans"). "Atlantis to Interzone" pulls a similar trick, beginning with a sampled shout of "DJ" and sirens from a cheap Yamaha keyboard, before revealing itself as a busy punk stomp. After these initial teases, the album drops all pretense of dance lineage in favor of various recombinations of glam and punk. At times, their lines circle in on themselves and layer, building gravity exponentially. Lyrically, the band create dense, imaginative collages full of indecipherable codes and vague totems such as Atlantis, Princess Di, and the zodiac.

Credit is due to producer James Ford, of Simian Mobile Disco, who alternately lends the album its gently dubbed atmospheres and its clutter of wrecked effects. The album's synthesis of familiar musical touchstones and futurist mysticism doesn't reinvent the past or predict the future, but it does create a pleasantly disorienting warp zone. ERIC GRANDY

!!!

Myth Takes

(Warp)

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!!! set an impossibly high standard for themselves with 2003's agit-prop dance epic "Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)." That breakout single crystallized a moment in time and made the band unlikely standard bearers for NYC's Sparks-and-blow set. But !!! were making stoned Sacramento house-party jams long before the disco-punk moment happened, and now that the moment has passed, they're making some of their best music yet.

Louden Up Now was a few anthems ("Me and Guiliani," "Pardon My Freedom") buttressed by club-ready filler; conversely, Myth Takes is a sweetly solid album without an obvious center.

The title track is a fun, tail-wagging greeting accented by spaghetti-western guitars and lycanthropic howls, but it gives way to "All My Heroes Are Weirdos," a not entirely unpleasant mess of appropriately odd shout-outs, instrumental swells, and dizzying percussion.

"Must Be the Moon" and "Heart of Hearts" are the most immediately appealing tracks and the best bets as possible singles. The former is the album's first proper !!! disco odyssey, a hilarious tale of a good night out and bummer a.m. propelled by pinging synths, stomping beats, and vampy stabs of reverb. "Heart of Hearts" works around a distressed diva chorus with typically squiggly bass, wah-wahed guitars, and shimmying high hats, building to a reverb-drenched climax that lasts for almost two minutes with just a short, flanged breather.

"Bend over Beethoven" also swells to overwhelming size in its final phase, but only after unfolding layers of relaxed funk for several minutes. "Sweet Life" and "Infinifold" open up a softer side of !!!: "Sweet Life" is a soulful nostalgia, while the latter is a heartfelt, star-gazing lament.

The accepted wisdom about these guys is that they're better at laying down grooves than they are at assembling good songs, but Myth Takes dispels that notion with more thoughtful songs, greater musical deviation, and something closer to the friendly warmth of their self-titled debut. ERIC GRANDY

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