The Singles Jukebox

“Just be sad, Greta, and then dance in a setting until children are also dancing behind you,” Jonze directed…

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[4.71]

Alfred Soto: The organ preset is the first of several irritants, the most notable of which is Win Butler not having or no longer possessing the voice to make “can we just work it out/scream and shout” resound like the multigenerational plea of its dreams. Grooveless and endless too. 
[4]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Appropriate how the coda holds the beating heart of the song, the much-deserved relaxed period to the rest’s architectural LOUDquietLOUD approach.
[7]

Mallory O’Donnell: Trad rock in hip pants, too many choruses and (barely) builds, big flanging echo-ed out single notes, boring music for sexy people. Yep, it’s a new Arcade Fire song.
[4]

Brad Shoup: The sentiments are so so trite, but the brass arrangement is robust. It introduces a more hopeful feeling — not to play up a sense of delusion, perhaps a sense that dumb ol’ rock construction still has monuments to build.
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: Even more so than “Reflektor,” this showcases the partnership between Arcade Fire and James Murphy really well. I imagine Murphy cribbing synth notes from “Bizarre Love Triangle” and helping lay down the dancefloor-ish feel present here, while Arcade Fire move away from the clunky technology fear-mongering in favor of a theme they’ve always handled a lot better — the dread of death. The pairing is still a bit off — when Arcade Fire tackle this theme, they tend to pull it off better when they can just completely unload rather than stay fenced in by a dance beat — but mixes in enough good points from both to make it work.
[7]

Anthony Easton: The worst thing about this new Arcade Fire album is that it has convinced me that James Murphy, while one of the best songwriters of his generation, is a much less interesting musician than I had previously thought.
[2]

Madeleine Lee: Elsewhere on YouTube, there’s the lyric video, which recuts Marcel Camus’s 1959 film Black Orpheus. This sat a bit strangely with me after I finished watching it, and after a while I realized it was because Black Orpheus, in its original form, is a much more moving interpretation of the balance between life and death than the repetitions of empty rhetorical questions in “Afterlife”, and it seemed a bit cheap to use one to compensate for the other. Not to mention that “Afterlife” is too damn dour to soundtrack a carnival, though I do appreciate the restraint practiced in the music and vocals — it’s almost hushed at parts, appropriately reverent, not theatrical.
[5]