I’ve been a big fan of Arcade Fire for a while now, but this
new album has blown me away. You need to get the physical CD in order to really
get what the band is saying, it’s very clever.
The cover art features the title of the album “Everything
Now” as a neon sign on a gate. The scene looks desolate, but there’s also a
color and a vibrancy to it. The dust jacket adds tiny hand drawn stars to the
sky, and there is a texture to the mountain, but only above the gate. Flip it
over and there’s a small figure of a horse (the figure is also textured, and
has more stars) and some small fires. There’s also a “For Sale By Owner” sign,
the owner is Arcade Fire, unsurprisingly. The dust jacket on the back reads
“Everything Now Presents Arcade Fire in partnership with” and then it lists the
titles of the songs on the album.
The lyrics sheet deserves an award or something, it’s
designed to look like a coupon booklet. The titles of the songs are the
different products being advertised, and the price instead displays how long
the song is. There are also pictures of the “products” being sold, such as a
green shirt for “Peter Pan” or marshmallows for “Creature Comfort.” And of
course there’s the lyrics instead of descriptions.
We haven’t even started listening to the music and there’s
already a statement being made about consumerism. The cover art hints at a dark
side to all this, with the brush fires on the back and the empty landscape.
This only continues with the lyrics.
It starts with “Everything Now,” a song where the refrain is
“you’ve got everything now/I need it/everything now/I want it/everything now/I
can’t live without/everything now.” The dark side is clearly evident in the
verses, as the singer tells us to “stop pretending” or asks his dad why he
isn’t around. The “shit I couldn’t live without” is everywhere, without any
empty spaces. “Every inch of road’s got a sign” just as the essential clutter
has filled up the narrator’s life. I could probably go on and on about this one
song, but you get the idea. We have so much and it’s all just shit, we don’t
have anything meaningful, we’re just pretending. Remember how the lyrics sheet
is a coupon book? Yeah, that shit.
We continue on to “Signs of Life.” The chorus here is
“looking for signs of life. Looking for signs every night, but there’s no signs
of life. So we do it again.” What I think they’re getting at here is that as a
result of having everything we’ve forgotten how to live, there’s no life
anywhere. Third song is “Creature Comfort,” which is fairly self-explanatory.
The song talk about people being unhappy and attempting suicide, saying that
they either want to be famous or have a painless death. Either they are turned
into the materialistic, perfect objects around them or they’re done living.
“Peter Pan,” the next song, is kind of the opposite. It idealizes childhood by
comparing the person’s old lover to Wendy and Peter Pan. Together they can
escape this madness.
Skip ahead to “Infinite Content.” This song is actually a
play on words, they’ve got infinite content, and are now infinitely content.
(But are they though?) There are two infinite contents, the second is slower
and more mellow, it pretty effectively casts doubt on the second statement just
with it’s mood.
“Good God Damn” is similar thematically to “Creature
Comfort” but the thing holding people back from death is that maybe there’s a
good God out there. Since “he made you” the possibility exists. This continues
with “Put Your Money On Me” which changes the context of this consumerism. If
the only thing good in life is other people, put your money on them instead of
the objects that make you hate yourself.
However this idea gets flipped in “We Don’t Deserve Love.”
Here the lover doesn’t think that they’re worthy of love, because that’s what
they’ve heard their entire life. They hide and wait for a “Christ-type” to save
them, when really all they have to do is “roll away the stone” and save
themselves.
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