Sound alternatives

DAVID BOWIE called them his favorite iPod download. U2 used their song "Wake Up" as the walk-on anthem for their last tour. Coldplay and David Byrne are unabashed fans. Not bad for a band that just debuted its second album.

As Neon Bible (Merge) proves, Arcade Fire is as complex as the veiled Christian messages in its music--and worthy of any adventurous listener's attention. The seven-piece band from Montreal, which includes front-man (and former religious studies major) Win Butler, his wife, Regine Chassagne, and his younger brother Will, recorded the album at a 19th-century red-brick church that the group bought and lived in for the project, And Neon Bible--from its title to its coda--appropriates and adorns itself in the sounds, symbols and subjects of Christian culture. In the hands of lesser artists, this would amount to titillation and contrivance. Here, the results thrill--and chill. The album presents theological and theatrical themes in shapes perhaps more befitting a funhouse than the Father's house. Yet the truth informing this jubilant mishmash of postpunk and symphonic sound ignites each song like a shaft of light.

Much of Neon Bible was cut live, with instrumentation that includes a 500-pipe organ, accordion, xylophone, hurdy-gurdy, violin and French horn. The songs are melodic, tight and infectious. The title track creeps along, commenting on religious indoctrination, with a ghoulish female backup chant and double-edged lyrics: "A vial of hope and a vial of pain / In the light they both looked the same / Poured them out onto the world / On every boy and every girl."

"Intervention" presents a stunning, spiraling indictment of how the religious right casts its fortunes with warmongers. Butler, sounding like a cousin of Echo and the Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch, rages against this hypocrisy: "Who's gonna throw the very first stone? / Oh! Who's gonna reset the bone?" The song "(Antichrist Television Blues)" seems like a Bruce Springsteen rock shuffle as Butler explores the evil of a God-fearing, working-class man who dreams that his teenage daughter will become eye candy on reality TV.

If Neon Bible has one drawback, it's that the scope and sound threaten to overload the listener. Yet unlike so many bands that have topped the charts through ambition void of any true invention, Arcade Fire has planted scripture's oldest themes in fresh settings and crafted something new.

COPYRIGHT 2007 The Christian Century Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning