Neon Bible

You know you’re onto something when David Bowie buys multiple copies of your debut album to give to friends as gifts. Or when, on every night of their global Vertigo tour, U2 play your song ‘Wake Up’ immediately before taking the stage.

So you’d be stupid to fiddle with what makes you unique: intelligent, ambitious lyrics backed by strident but idiosyncratic music that adds cellos, accordions, xylophones, harps, French horns, and church organs to the traditional indie rock weapons of guitar, bass and drums. And the Arcade Fire aren’t stupid.

After all, they’ve named their second album after the John Kennedy Toole coming-of-age novel with its themes of religious observance versus spiritual emptiness, innocence versus society’s bigotry.

No room for “I’m bringing sexy back”, then.

“The thing that interests me is singing about the things that you are not supposed to sing about in rock, finding simple ways to articulate difficult, complicated feelings,” band leader Win Butler told the Observer.

But while religion, death, war and love are the order of the day, the singer knows to package his weighty themes in stirring tunes. Influenced by everything from ‘80s melancholia (Joy Division, The Smiths, The Bunnymen) and US folk (Dylan, Young, Springsteen) to Radiohead and the local church hymn book, Butler and his cohorts rock out with the force only a seven-piece band could muster.

They’re certainly as buoyant as last time around — and even more confident. But never brash. There’s still a sense of innocence and wonder, and even a hint of helplessness, as the world goes to hell around them.

“Men are coming to take me away, I don’t know why, but I know I can’t stay” Butler frets in the musically upbeat ‘Keep The Car Running’, tackling the culture of fear and paranoia being bred in the US.

“Don’t wanna fight in a holy war, Don’t want the salesmen knocking at my door, I don’t wanna live in America no more” he continues in the protest folk song ‘Windowsill’, while the ‘Born To Run’-inspired ‘(Antichrist Television Blues)’ also looks at life in the land where the planes “keep crashing always two by two” — this time through the eyes of a God-fearing blue-collar American.

And the hymnal ‘Intervention’, complete with gospel-style backing vocals from Mrs Butler, Régine Chassagne, is pure desperation: “Working for the church while your life falls apart. Sing hallelujah with the fear in your heart, Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home. Hear the soldier groan, ‘We’ll go it alone’.”

There is (some) hope and (some) love. The uninhibited ‘No Cars Go’ speaks of freedom while the duet between husband and wife ‘Black Wave/Bad Vibrations’ promises escape. “We can reach the sea. They won’t follow me. Shadows they fear the sun. We’ll make it if we run,” she sings — even if he later counters with “there’s a great black wave in the middle of the sea for me”.

Clearly, every silver lining has a cloud — yet ‘Neon Bible’ is as refreshing as a walk through the rain. “I’m living in an age that calls darkness light,” laments Butler in the funereal ‘My Body Is A Cage’. But his profound, prophetic songs are striving to end the MTV generation’s creative malaise. It’s time to think. It’s time to break free.