Arcade Fire at Twenty: Still Looking for Signal

Twenty years is a long time to make the same kind of noise. Arcade Fire's secret has always been that they never quite settled on what the noise was.

The sound check in Montreal starts just after four in the afternoon. Win Butler is holding a hurdy-gurdy. There's an actual hurdy-gurdy on the stage, next to the usual accordion, the usual pile of pedals, the usual oversized percussion ring that Régine Chassagne orbits like a planet. The band is twenty years into one of the most unlikely runs in indie rock, and this is apparently still the way they warm up.

Funeral, still

You can trace most of what came after to the first forty seconds of "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)." A quiet piano. A snare that announces itself. A voice that announces nothing — just arrives. It's the opening of their 2004 debut Funeral and in some ways, it's still their most radical gesture: an entire indie rock scene committing itself to earnestness without irony.

At twenty, Funeral is a record that benefits from distance. The songs that felt most immediate at release — "Rebellion (Lies)," "Wake Up" — have aged into standards. The ones that felt most like filler have revealed themselves as architecture. Repeated listens turn "In the Backseat" into the album's secret heart, with Chassagne delivering the album's thesis statement in a voice so small you have to lean forward to hear it.

"We never thought anyone outside our circle would hear it. That gave us a kind of freedom you can't manufacture after."

What came next

Neon Bible (2007) is the album the critics underrated and the fans turned into scripture. Everything Now (2017) is the album the critics overrated and the fans still argue about. In between there was Reflektor (2013), the record this magazine took its name from — a disco-tinged, James-Murphy-produced sprawl that split the audience and gave the band a vocabulary of distance to work in.

The current tour leans heavily on Funeral and Reflektor. It's a strange combination on paper and a revealing one in person. The band isn't retreating to their best-loved record. They're putting it next to the record that complicated it. The suggestion is that you can't understand one without the other.

The ring, revisited

Chassagne's percussion ring has gotten larger over the years. On this tour, it's bordering on absurd — a chrome halo surrounded by cymbals, cowbells, and what appears to be an actual car hubcap. She moves inside it like a priestess inside a very loud piece of jewelry. The band has always understood staging in a way that most of their peers never bothered to learn. This is still the point.

The question of relevance

Indie rock as a critical category is dead. Arcade Fire were among its last standard-bearers, and they survived its collapse by refusing to be any one thing. The current live show includes a passage of noise rock, a cover of a 1960s Haitian compas standard, and a four-minute meditation on grief delivered with full orchestral backing. It is unapologetically much.

At twenty, Arcade Fire remains a band whose virtue is proportionality. They make big music about big subjects for people who have decided, often against the evidence, that life is a big subject worth taking seriously. The vocabulary is dated. The sentiment isn't.

Setlist, Montreal, night two

1. Rebellion (Lies)
2. Keep the Car Running
3. Here Comes the Night Time
4. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
5. No Cars Go
6. Reflektor
7. The Suburbs
8. Afterlife
9. Haïti
10. Everything Now
11. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
12. Wake Up

Twenty years. A hurdy-gurdy. A hubcap. Still a band worth standing up for.