U2, Floyd, and neo-new wave bands mentioned, but no one's caught on to the most obvious reference point here?
You can hear it in the musings on "my father's house" in "Windowsill" and even in the solemn Darkness on the Edge of Town organ chords at the beginning of "My Body is a Cage," among other places, but if "Building Downtown," which could practically be an Arcade Fire'ed cover of something off the River or Nebraska, doesn't tip you off that Win and company were listening to boatloads of Springsteen while they were writing this album, you need to further acquaint yourself with the man's catalog. And it makes perfect sense, because, despite their sonic and personal connections with David Byrne (who tends to wear his brain on his sleeve more often than his heart), the Arcade Fire share an earnestness with Springsteen that few other modern bands do.
The new "No Cars Go" destroys the old one. No contest. When you see that song live, it sounds enormous (as do most of their songs). When it comes to studio recording, it's impossible to capture the same sort of live ambience, but they more than compensate with the additional orchestration.
Neon Bible doesn't have the advantage of surprise like Funeral did nor the nifty death-in-the-family concept album angle, but I really can't find much fault with it - it's quite good from beginning to end, if not particularly surprising. If we're keeping track, Arcade Fire has fared MUCH better than Broken Social Scene in providing a follow-up that builds on the success of their first album without self-consciously sabotaging themselves into strictly cult status. The Arcade Fire had two choices: to continue with a fairly straightforward, populist sound that they were probably surprised to find had some mainstream appeal and risk being perceived as "sell-outs" or to deliberately make a more oblique, less satisfyingly hooky follow-up to keep the indie-cracy interested. I think they made the right choice. Anthems may be anathema to some of the hipsters who initially embraced the band (of course, anthems are just fine if performed by a small band - by the end of the last tour, they barely qualified as such), but anthems are what they do very, very well.
