Arcade Fire’s ‘Pink Elephant’ Album Review: A Tumultuous Return
The highly anticipated seventh album from Canadian indie rock band Arcade Fire, ‘Pink Elephant’, has finally arrived, marking a significant return for the group after a very public reputational upheaval. The album’s title track offers a clever rhetorical inversion, with frontman Win Butler begging someone to have fun and stop worrying about him for a change, while expressing love via an inability to take his mind off them.
According to Vulture.com, the paradox of the pink elephant offers a heady thematic conceit for the album, which explores the idea that once an idea is mentioned, it cannot be erased from one’s consciousness. This concept looms heavily over the album, which is the first from Arcade Fire following a series of allegations against Butler. In a 2002 article published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods, psychologist Janice Morse and philosopher Carl Mitcham noted that "‘Don‘t think of a pink elephant!’ is an impossible instruction," for once the idea of a pink elephant is mentioned, it cannot be erased from one’s consciousness.
As reported by Vulture.com, the allegations against Butler emerged in a Pitchfork report before their ‘WE’ tour in fall 2022, which uncovered multiple claims that Butler had wielded his influence and social-media presence to coerce young women into sex and to send them unwanted graphic texts during the late 2010s. His response offered an admission of infidelity and a string of rebuttals to each claim of misdoing. His wife and bandmate, Régine Chassagne, expressed faith in her husband and disbelief in the allegation that he had forced himself on one of his accusers.
The album ‘Pink Elephant’ steers clear of directly addressing the allegations, instead focusing on themes of moving through tumult and renewed commitment. When we hear Butler or Chassagne sing or speak, it is of love and devotion. “It’s the time of the season,” she whispers in the couples duet “Year of the Snake,” floating a Zombies reference that she quickly weaponizes, “when you think about leaving.” Her voice later drops out as Butler croons: “I tried to be good / But I’m a real boy / My heart’s full of love / It’s not made out of wood.”
The music on ‘Pink Elephant’ has been crafted with Daniel Lanois, who has worked with U2 and Peter Gabriel, and features a grittier and more claustrophobic sound than the band’s previous album ‘WE’. The album’s sound is characterized by a slick marriage of roots rock and Pacific Northwest indie aesthetics, with Butler citing “mystical punk” and Venezuelan folk singer Simón Díaz as inspirations.
However, the album’s approach has been criticized for being too focused on business-as-usual, with some fans still trying to work out how to feel about the return of the band. As Vulture.com notes, the band’s launches are typically loud and sometimes polarizing, but this time around, they have been scarce and guarded in their direct communications.
The album’s best tracks, such as “Ride or Die” and “Stuck in My Head”, showcase the band’s ability to craft catchy and emotive songs, but others, like “Alien Nation”, have been criticized for being too focused on nostalgia and not enough on newer directions. As Vulture.com observes, the band’s attempt to hurry back to warming hearts feels like a tacit statement that they are "not going away and we’re moving on."
Ultimately, ‘Pink Elephant’ is an album that is haunted by the allegations against Butler and the band’s response to them. The lack of acknowledgement of where things were left with the band after the allegations haunts the album’s highlights and clunkers. As Vulture.com notes, it feels like the band that wrote “My Body Is a Cage,” the glum and almost liturgical 2007 track that wormed its way into years of TV placements, boxed itself into an ideological corner where it speaks obliquely through new-wave and new-romantic ballads.
The music on ‘Pink Elephant’ is drenched in contradictions, and it’s difficult not to read Butler forgiving naysayers in the butt-rock song “Alien Nation” as anything other than a retort to anyone who expressed mistrust of this band. The gesture lands before an update on how he’s continuing to improve himself. As Vulture.com concludes, it stings for vocal humanitarian advocates to clam up about misgivings pointed their own way, and it’s too bad the surreptitiously uncanceled aren’t using their newfound freedom to be more forthright.
Source: Vulture.com – Arcade Fire’s ‘Pink Elephant’ Album Review
