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The Great Rock HopeArcade Fire grabs the baton from Bruce Springsteen and U2.

By Jody Rosen
Posted Tuesday, March 13, 2007, at 4:37 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

This last gasp of rock triumphalism helps explain the critical adulation poured on Arcade Fire. (Disclosure: I'm one of the adoring critics—I gave Neon Bible a rave in Entertainment Weekly.) Most music writers, even those who love hip-hop, remain invested in the idea of rock's relevance and in a heroic lineage that extends from the Beatles and the Stones down through U2 and Springsteen to the present day. Arcade Fire fits squarely into The Tradition—its fans include Hall of Famers like David Bowie, David Byrne, and, sure enough, U2.

And yet, Arcade Fire has a ragtag indie spirit that makes it feel like an underdog, even as it executes Olympian gestures copied from Bono's and Bruce's playbook. In part, this is because the band has no real star. Butler is the nominal frontman, but he's not a divo. Onstage, Arcade Fire is democracy in action, with different players stepping forward to claim the spotlight and to switch instruments. At one of the band's recent shows at Manhattan's Judson Memorial Church, the most charismatic figures were the ensemble players: Sarah Neufeld furiously sawing at her violin at stage right or Will Butler (Win's brother) clobbering a huge marching-band drum with a mallet, chain-gang style. This blend of scruffy indie-rock egalitarianism and classic-rock pomp has never before been so perfectly achieved. At Judson Memorial Church, even those of us who are a bit cynical about indie ideals of authenticity and community felt our hearts melt when, in their signature fourth-wall-shattering stunt, the band trundled its acoustic instruments into the crowd, formed a circle in the center of the church sanctuary, and performed a singalong version of the anthem "Wake Up," unamplified except for megaphones mounted on mike stands. It was the ultimate demythologizing indie move: By stepping off of the stage, wading into the scrum on the floor below, Arcade Fire's members in effect told their audience: You guys are in the band, too.

All the large-heartedness would be moot if Arcade Fire didn't have the songs. On the new album, songwriting seals the deal—the band has a theme worthy of its epic sound. Neon Bible is a post-9/11 album, packed with images of war, ruin, and the longing for escape. At times, the protest is blunt ("Don't wanna fight in a holy war…/ Don't want the salesmen knocking at my door," Butler sings in "Windowsill"); occasionally, the references are explicit ("I don't wanna work in a building downtown/ I don't know what I'm gonna do/ 'Cause the planes keep crashing, always two by two"). But more often, the songs abjure sloganeering or reportage to simply catch the dreadful mood of a wartime world. Butler and company aren't poets by any stretch of the imagination, but their occasionally inelegant lyrics capture the confusion and paralyzing terror of the moment better than almost any of the ballyhooed records released in the wake of Sept. 11, including Springsteen's The Rising. And, of course, it's in their magnificent, outsized music that Arcade Fire's real eloquence lies. The band's sonic grandiosity turns out to be, of all things, topical—a shattering sound of and for our time.

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Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at .
Photograph of Bruce Springsteen on Slate's home page by Bru Garcia/AFP/Getty Images.
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