In just two weeks the Arcade Fire's new album, Neon Bible, will hit the shops like a particularly forceful riot of brimstone, religious portent and Civil-War frockery. Already the pop fans are slobbering and the critics are slavering - even I am and, for crying out loud, I've already got a copy (highly watermarked, fabulous, and, no, you can't rip it).
Let's put my personal enthusiasms aside for a moment, though. How come the Arcade Fire are now one of those bands about whom there is now almost a complete critical consensus? The NME, who feature the band on their cover this week, describe them as the world's best band. And you already know that reviews of Neon Bible will be accompanied by a surfeit of glittering stars. The Fire (as Smash Hits would've inevitably called them) have already entered that special circle where Radiohead, Bjork and, more recently, the Arctic Monkeys and Joanna Newsom have nestled rather cosily. In this highly ranked sphere, they are exalted, superior, untouchable.
But what is the recipe for this kind of critical adulation? What do all these bands have in common? Firstly, they're all musicians who have worked hard to create fully rounded, recognisable identities, ones they've managed - through smatterings of cleverness, mastery of the dark arts or otherwise - to make look and sound totally original. A strange sort of intelligence, ambition and a taste for innovation is key to this potion. Radiohead are pseudy, adventurous, intellectual artisans, preoccupied with politics and psychology; Bjork is an eccentric, musical changeling who plays with genres and language like toys; the Arctic Monkeys are sweat, beer and testosterone captured intelligently with arch eyebrows, knowing smirks and sharp tongues; Joanna Newsom is wildly weird and bookish, obsessed with the supernatural and scientific properties of bones, animals and constellations.
The Arcade Fire always allude to funereal or hymnal ideas in their lyrics and sounds, wear old-fashioned, gothic clothes, mix the dark, synthy sounds of early 80s pop with antique instruments. Other bands now "sound like the Arcade Fire." the Arcade Fire are so solid a prospect that they've become a reference, a cultural marker themselves.
There are practical reasons for critics rating these musicians so highly, too. For, although reviewing music is a wonderful way to spend one's working hours, the majority of the stuff that emerges from the record-label jiffy bag is dull, dry and dumpable (a comparable experience to wading through the charts). When something comes along that pushes that cushioned envelope, that stretches expectations, that - God alive - gets the brain working, reviewers can never thank the culprit enough. Also, reviews editors enjoy giving albums to enthusiastic reviewers so that excitable copy comes back. And, yes, us critics probably like a lot of the bands above because we're terrible ponces.
But these bands shouldn't be untouchable. In the real world, there are people who couldn't give a fig about these bands, and there are surely critics who feel similarly - critics who should speak out more and risk the wrath of the fans. Like the Observer's Kitty Empire and the Guardian's Maddy Costa, who dared to criticise Joanna Newsom a little in recent concert reviews. Fans went ape all over the message boards, yet this huge admirer of the harpist punched the air. More intelligent criticism that takes a different position is refreshing and necessary, please, sir.
You know, there are even two tracks on the Neon Bible so dull that I skip through them every time...
