Jump to content

PO: Arcade Fire - WE (Out May 6th)


Recommended Posts

3 hours ago, Vega said:

My god... it's their best album since The Suburbs, totally in love with it.

It's a shame my brown pressing cracks and pops all the way through, gonna get a black, a blue and picture disc pressing the coming days, hopefully one of those will sound good.

Have got the white version and it sounds good

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Glad to see the record get some love from early impressions here on VC.  Reception seems to be lukewarm at best just about everywhere else.  The biggest [most frequent] gripes I've read are around contrived lyrics – which aren't as bad as EN's worst ones, if you ask me – or how "boring" and "safe" the record sounds.  I don't think it's overly experimental but it definitely does enough right to warrant repeat listens.  I'm pretty happy with it.

There's also a small crowd that is (very ironically) whining about how the band is now tailored for anthemic, arena dad rock.  I imagine they're expecting the band to magically return to the same sound from 2004 and drop Funeral II.  We'll just ignore the fact that a good chunk of active Arcade Fire listeners have probably become dads in the last 18 years.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I really want to like this album but I'm one of the people turned off by some of the cringey lyrics.  I'd say the weaker points for me are the beginning of "Rabbit Hole" (however Regine's part in the last third is amazing and an album highlight), "Race and Religion", and "End of the Empire IV".  Best parts are the already released singles + "End of the Empire I-III", "WE" and "Age of Anxiety I".

 

So basically two and a half songs on the album don't really do it for me. Otherwise, pretty solid.

 

The music itself is really great and overall I'd still put WE ahead of Everything Now. I kinda feel like the first singles leaned more towards"classic" Arcade Fire while the more dancey elements from Everything Now and Reflektor are still alive and well in other songs.

 

I'm not asking for Funeral II but I wish they would stop trying to write songs about the internet. Or at least come up with less clunky lyrics.

 

Looking forward to seeing them on SNL tonight.

 

Edited cause I got "WE" and part of "End of the Empire" mixed up.

Edited by Subdomestic
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, dnl said:

I would really like the story behind how the cursor on the cover made it through quality control

spacer.png

My brown copy has a cross cursor on it, it's not an accident. Probably about how the digital age comes in the way of connecting with a piece of art and a shared humanity, one of the themes AF has been talking about since Reflektor.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 5/7/2022 at 5:01 PM, Derek™ said:

Glad to see the record get some love from early impressions here on VC.  Reception seems to be lukewarm at best just about everywhere else.  The biggest [most frequent] gripes I've read are around contrived lyrics – which aren't as bad as EN's worst ones, if you ask me – or how "boring" and "safe" the record sounds.  I don't think it's overly experimental but it definitely does enough right to warrant repeat listens.  I'm pretty happy with it.

There's also a small crowd that is (very ironically) whining about how the band is now tailored for anthemic, arena dad rock.  I imagine they're expecting the band to magically return to the same sound from 2004 and drop Funeral II.  We'll just ignore the fact that a good chunk of active Arcade Fire listeners have probably become dads in the last 18 years.

Me - I’m dads

Link to comment
Share on other sites

38 minutes ago, scottheisel said:

I don’t know why this is hard to imagine. How many different cover variants were there for EN, anyway? At least a half-dozen or so. 

Yeah, quite a few variants.  Didn’t they feature the same art, just at a different time of day?  I’m trying to picture how many of them had intentionally visible Photoshop tool-tips and I can’t seem to recall any.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

38 minutes ago, Derek™ said:

Yeah, quite a few variants.  Didn’t they feature the same art, just at a different time of day?  I’m trying to picture how many of them had intentionally visible Photoshop tool-tips and I can’t seem to recall any.

For EN, there were night/day variants with different coloured sleeves and vinyl and there were also variants with the "Everything Now" title written in different languages.

Edited by Subdomestic
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Someone on Reddit emailed the store and got a reply back that it was intentional. It's in the original image on their site if you look closely. Oddly they modified the brown version to hide that cursor in the mockups though. It's kind of transparent white vs the black crosshairs on the final product.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×

AdBlock Detected

spacer.png

We noticed that you're using an adBlocker

Yes, I'll whitelist