Arcade Fire’s USP is a kind of neurotic ecstasy: everything’s terrible (especially the internet), let’s dance. Their muscular opening number, Age of Anxiety I, is proof of concept. Win Butler plunges into the crowd while Régine Chassagne rakes the room with handheld green lasers and merrily chants: “Anxiety!” Above them, on the backcloth, a giant red eye surveys the action. It’s a reference to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, the 1920s dystopian novel that inspired the title and theme of their new album.
Arcade Fire have been banging the technosceptic drum for years (their 2007 song Black Mirror predated the TV show) but if they talk a lot about the vital importance of human connection in a digital era, then they also walk the walk. The stage is a throng of bodies jumping from instrument to instrument. There’s three of everything – guitars, keyboards, drum kits – not to mention the occasional double bass, accordion and keytar. It’s like the fully expanded Talking Heads lineup at the end of Stop Making Sense, but for the full two hours, and louder.
The grand reopening of the refurbished Koko in London after a three-year silence is a comeback for the band, too. Like U2’s Pop 20 years earlier, 2017’s dance-pop symposium Everything Now was a bridge too far, met by muted reviews and stuttering ticket sales. The far superior We has been viewed as a course correction back towards apocalyptic rock but it’s less a retreat than a merger. The electro-disco throb and whoosh of Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole) slides neatly between Reflektor and Creature Comfort in a body-moving sequence that is every bit as exciting as early anthems Wake Up and Rebellion (Lies). Like the new album, the setlist ties together every phase of their career and grants coherence to what has sometimes sounded like an identity crisis.
Arcade Fire may be operating without the hi-tech shenanigans of their arena shows but they still have Chassagne, who is a human special effect and an inexhaustible engine of joy, whether she’s pounding the drums, busting out a dance routine with orange luminescent wrist bands or triggering a belt that radiates a skirt of red lasers. More than ever, it feels as if Robyn has formed a band with Jonathan Franzen.
Butler’s constant striving for a transcendence that is just out of reach is probably what gives Arcade Fire their electrifying urgency but there is a fine line between inspiring the crowd to surrender to the moment and sounding like an exasperated dad who wishes that his kids would turn off their phones for one goddam minute. Before the gospel-like My Body Is a Cage, a rare pause for breath, he asks three times for silence. “I’m not trying to be an asshole,” he says quasi-apologetically. “I just think it would be beautiful if nobody talked.” He’s not wrong though. It is. Arcade Fire work hard to make you feel that, right here, right now, you are experiencing something unrepeatably wonderful.
