Photo: WENN
"Sound is happening all around you," says a voice early on in Arcade Fire's new Reflektor Tapes movie. "There are new hybrids of vast oceans of musical waves going back and forth. You have to combine with that new force to make a new kind of wave."
That, in its purest essence is the mission statement of Arcade Fire on Reflektor. Far more than just a band - but a new wave of sound, experience, colour and life. The record itself was genre-defying and era-defining, one produced by the kind of band that only comes around once in a generation. The tour that followed, was all about bringing that feeling to life - a multi-sensory fantasy. This film, was only ever going to follow in that spirit, in getting under the skin of this band in the most unreal and surreal of terms.
"One of the deep roots of Arcade Fire's aesthetic, is trying to ignore the world and make art just the people in the room around you," we are told. But it doesn't stop there - the fans are swept away too. So say goodbye to what you know, and get lost in Arcade Fire. As you'd expect, this is not your standard road narrative flick. Reflektor tapes is a fantastic fever dream montage of outtakes, studio footage, concert clips, intimate interviews, fan portraits and mesmeric hallucinations. As Regine Chassagne says, music should be 'like a diamond with a million cuts in it', and this film is the world put through the magnificent prism of Arcade Fire.
"Making bobbleheads of ourselves was a way to invert our relationship with the audience by kind of making cartoon characters of ourselves," says Win Butler of their now iconic stage carnival costumes during the tour. "To not just be taking pictures all the time and to move beyond the crowd and feel some kind of communal energy with the whole thing."
In 'Flashbulb Eyes', the band ask 'What if the cameras really do take your soul?', and you genuinely do believe that this isn't just a rag-tag collective of art school snots posing, but artists genuinely committed to bypassing the traps and distractions of the modern world to deliver the purest experience of what they intended. Where the ambition and fantasy becomes manifest, the music becomes physical and we all feel part of Arcade Fire.
At one point, they flash up the Kierkegaard quote that "the present age is one of understanding, of reflection, devoid of passion, an age which flies into enthusiasm for a moment, only to decline back into indolence". All this film proves is that when a band are this dedicated and caught up in their own vision, then 'the new universes in which their stories happen' become all there is. There is no decline.
Fans will fall and worship at the alter of this film (not least for the concert footage of a live band at the peak of their powers and the incredible new tracks in the form of the bluesy swamp slude of 'Get Right' and the heartbreaking lament of 'Crucified Again'), but newcomers too will be drunk on the decadence of this dizzying trip into the world of a band like no other.
True, there could be a bit more grit, documentary and insight into the human strifes and troubles of this band, but that would ruin the fantasy. The Reflektor Tapes is an extraordinary potrait of arguably the most extraordinary band of our time. Call it pretentious if you will, and go in search of a far more straightp music movie, but once again Arcade Fire have changed the game. Forget what's normal - if that's what's normal now, we don't want to know.
- The Reflektor Tapes is in cinemas from 24 September
