The Canadian alt-rockers return with their sixth LP - one filled with almost messianic singalong stadium anthems and also quieter intimacy, perhaps not quite at the peak of their first three, but still a return to past form after 2017’s commercial concept album Everything Now. But Win Butler, Régine Chassagne and co now have Nigel Godrich as their co-producer, as well as guest performers Father John Misty, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Peter Gabriel and this very much feels more like the old Arcade Fire with emotive, soaring songs that recapture much of the magic of Funeral, Neon Bible and The Suburbs, . There are heady heights with the mainstream but also moving Unconditional I (Lookout Kid) if you can get past the “do-do-do-do” singalong, the bigger sound of more commercial crowd-pleasers Age of Anxiety I, and The Lightning I, II, and the epic four-part nine-minute End of the Empire I-IV, which contains some piano balladry recalling John Lennon’s Mind Games period. This 40-minute album does have an overarching theme – a cathartic journey with an arc from darkness into light over the course of seven songs divided into two distinct sides - Side “I” channeling the fear and loneliness of isolation, and Side “WE” expressing the joy and power of reconnection. The album’s cover art is a photograph of a human eye by the artist JR evokes Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy. It’s hard not to get sucked in. Out on Columbia Records.
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