Album Review: Pink Elephant by Arcade Fire

The Canadian quintet’s seventh album may stir up some nostalgia for the band's former brilliance, but it leaves a shallow void where their spark once was "It's a season of change," sing Win Butler and Régine Chassagne on Year Of The Snake. It’s a line delivered with the kind of sincerity Arcade Fire once wielded to great effect, but here, it lands with an unfortunate irony. Pink Elephant, their seventh album, does not so much signal renewal as it confirms a band in creative crisis.

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Baby's first track-by-track I've got too much time on my hands. How else to explain the amount of mental energy I've exerted comparing the quality of Arcade Fire's latest album with their 2017 notable disaster Everything Now? The fact that Pink Elephant is even comparable to the band's universally-accepted previous nadir is bad enough, but I think their latest output probably marks a new low. There may not be any tracks here which make you want to pull a Van Gogh on your own ears like "Chemistry" did, but Everything Now also possessed a few quality tracks, like "Electric Blue" and "Put Your Money On Me", and Arcade Fire seems incapable of crafting tracks now in which one solid musical element isn't let down by another poor one.

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Stink Elephant Can the power of love overcome allegations of sexual misconduct? Bafflingly, this question is the closest thing that Arcade Fire's seventh offering, Pink Elephant, has to a thesis as it claws against its threadbare songwriting and tone deaf lyricism for any remaining inkling of charm that the group once had. This is, of course, due in large part to the bombshell article released after 2022's WE that, if nothing else, recontextualized frontman Win Butler's ongoing decade-plus feud with smartphones as more frustration with his daily allotment of Tinder likes, rather than an earnest attempt at trying to navigate a technological landscape whose social implications far outpace our ability to understand them. While the band's direction would have no doubt had to tackle this loss of goodwill* in some capacity, they split the difference in such a way that the ick is never fully addressed nor is it ever tucked away out of view.

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Just as dramatic as Arcade Fire's ascent to indie-rock royalty in the early-to-mid 2010s has been the Canadian band's commercial and critical decline over the last 10 years. There was once a rigor to Win Butler and Régine Chassagne's songwriting that seems to have been irrevocably lost, and their seventh studio album, Pink Elephant, plays like two or more stylistically incompatible efforts competing for dominance. Following an extraneous instrumental opening track, the album proper begins with two lo-fi rock songs, the title track and "Year of the Snake"--an apparent course correction for Arcade Fire after three slickly produced releases in a row.

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