Two weeks afterit was posted, the final segment of Arcade Fire’s recent Porchester Hall show has registered more than 50,000 hits on YouTube. By the time the footage begins, Win Butler’s Montreal octet have already left the stage. Then, still wielding their instruments, we see them walking to the lobby, where they perform Wake Up — just one of many songs from 2005’s Funeral album, which alchemised a string of personal bereavements into that year’s most redemptive record. Even on your low-definition web browser you can easily see the uncomfortable body language of bouncers who think that they’re witnessing some Heaven’s Gate -style moment of cult bonding.

And who knows? By the end of Black Mirror , the opening song on Neon Bible , it’s by no means certain that those bouncers don’t have a point. “The black mirror . . . knows not pride or vanity,” sings Butler as a warped migraine thump of skin and ivory keeps the beat. For such extremes of ego-purging sermonising fans of a certain age will no doubt remember Dexys Midnight Runners’ Kevin Rowland — who, in his tortured heyday, was regularly delivering lyrics that explored the same terrain as Butler’s Where Cars Go and My Body is a Cage . “Set my spirit free,” implores the Texas-raised singer on the latter, as an oppressive crescendo echoes around the local church where they recorded it.

Rowland and Butler are united by still more similarities than at first apparent. Just as Rowland did with his band 25 years previously, Butler insisted that for Neon Bible his band learn new instruments to help preserve the innocence of earlier recordings. Hence, celestes and hurdy-gurdys vie with spooky, somnambulant synths on the urgent Black Wave/Bad Vibrations . Here, as on so many songs, it’s Butler’s inability to reconcile the trappings of the modern world with Christian values that feeds the nightmare. Sounding like Bruce Springsteen in a hair shirt, (Antichrist Television Blues) casts Butler as a hard-up parent watching a television talent show and praying that his daughter be spared the travails of his own life by becoming an American Idol.

At times, you wonder if a more emphatically serious album has been made in the past decade. Last week, Butler told NME that the thing that interests him about religion is its reluctance to take a “light-hearted view” of human nature. Clearly a lot has changed since Butler’s teenage spell in a school band called Willy W****r and the Chocolate Factories — and nowhere is that more apparent than on the breathtaking Intervention . A deafening church organ announces itself like the fist of an Old Testament God smashing through the stained glass, and Butler’s fraught examination of crumbling belief rises to its conclusion over a motif that — consciously or otherwise — seems to turn into We Shall Overcome .

Time and time again it’s hard not to feel a modicum of concern for a frontman so set on shedding his earthly container. Once you’ve said all your prayers and sung all your songs, who do you see about a problem like that? If only he could hear what we’re hearing.

Merge

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