It's good, very good in fact, from the get-go - that is, from the ominously stormy, climbing but never quite resolving introduction of "Black Mirror" - but the moment on Neon Bible when I first really thought "yes!" to myself came somewhere in "Intervention" which, crashing through in waves, is towering and unabashed and really just too magnificent for words.
Generally, the album has more of a mythic quality than Funeral and it seems more clearly to be grounded in classic rock and roll than the band's debut (which sounded, when it first exploded upon us, near completely sui generis); to my ears, the record is resonant with the echoing highways of Bruce Springsteen, and peopled by the shadows of some of rock's most darkly, fervently inspired figures, haunted visionaries like Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and Nick Cave. But the ornately baroque, heightened undercurrent of fraughtness that has most characterised the band's sound in the past still dominates, and their urgency and fire hasn't diminished one bit, nor their propensity for dramatic, veering shifts and subversions of both the traditional rock songbook and the expectations set up by the beginnings of their own songs.
My initial sense is that Neon Bible is a more challenging and more substantial album than its predecessor lp, if lacking in the obvious immediate high points of that other (the pleasures of Neon Bible are more subtle than those of Funeral), and probably a darker one, and likely to be just as rewarding over time, if not more so. On the strength of this record and what they've done so far, I reckon that the Arcade Fire are right on the verge of greatness.
