A slight drop in musical quality isn’t too concerning. I love their stiff, awkward, perplexing attempts at expressing a self-deprecating sense of humor that is very genuine and very inscrutable most of the time, which of course only makes it funnier. I love this band I love them so much I even love reading dispatches from people who hate or at least distrust them. Everything Now is Arcade Fire’s worst album - which is not such a terrible thing, given the overwhelming excellence of Funeral, or 2007’s doomy Neon Bible, or 2010’s sprawling and mournful The Suburbs, or, yes, in its bloated way, even 2013’s disco-flirting Reflektor. They’re firing off distractions like wild. (“PLEASE DO NOT WEAR shorts, large logos, flip flops, tank tops, crop tops, baseball hats, solid white or red clothing.”) The band, which has some experience with dress-code controversies, quickly denied requesting this one, then seized on this fracas for yet another goofy press release and yet another goofy Twitter contest. This queasy mix of saturation and disorientation peaked earlier this week, when Arcade Fire announced a Brooklyn show that touted a “HIP & TRENDY” dress code of the sort that often carries racist overtones. But the site has turned on the band a bit lately, and now comes the band’s bizarre satirical response: Stereogum, of course, being a major online rock-critic hub starting in the mid-’00s, was part of the massive wave of enthusiasm that helped propel the band to arenas in the first place.
A less-crucial aspect of the arena-rock experience is writing an entire fake Stereogum “Premature Evaluation” review of your new album a week before release, a very “Eminem at the end of 8 Mile” preemptive strike that projects more self-doubt than self-awareness.
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