Back in 2018 I wrote a post for AML about the implicit Mormonism of longstanding Indie-darlings Arcade Fire, whose frontman Win Butler was raised LDS in suburban Texas. To recap and review: on their most iconic song Wake Up, from their still-popular 2004 debut Funeral^[1]If you ever want to feel old, just ask some Gen Z college freshmen what their favorite pop-culture decade is, and be prepared to hear how many cite “mid-2000s Indie,” of which Funeral is … Continue reading, the climactic line “We’re just a million little gods causing rainstorms/turning every good thing to rust” appears to be interrogating the distinctly LDS belief that we are all children of God in the most literal sense, “and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him” (Romans 8:17)—or as Lorenzo Snow once wrote, “As Man is now, God once was/As God is now, man may become”—wherein our divine potential to create is matched only by our infantile capacity to ruin every good thing we touch.

Likewise, on their 2007 LP Neon Bible^[2]unfairly overshadowed by Funeral as their true masterpiece, IMHO, the standout track Antichrist Television Blues directly quotes Isaiah 29:13, “My lips are near but my heart is far away,” which was in turn quoted by Christ Himself to Joseph Smith at the First Vision. Similarly, the line “You’ll always be a stranger in a strange, strange land” alludes to Hebrews 11:13, which is oft cited in LDS circles to express our belief in our pre-mortal existence, that we are in fact strangers and pilgrims upon this Earth.

The rest of Neon Bible is likewise littered with these LDS moments: the full name of the Church is of course The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which name expresses an expectation for the imminent Second Coming of Christ, an event of which even the angels know not “that day and hour” (Matthew 24:36)—or, as in the lyrics to Keep the Car Running, “they don’t know where and they don’t know when it’s coming/oh when, but it’s coming”.

Butler also critiques the LDS doctrines of free agency with Ocean of Noise‘s “Now who here among us/Still believes in choice/Not I”, as well as the necessity of the body and the spirits’ union for a fullness of joy with My Body is a Cage “that keeps me from dancing/with the one I love”—and I don’t think he would’ve engaged with these ideas if he hadn’t been raised hearing all about them. My Body is a Cage also declares “I’m living in an age/That calls darkness light”, another Isaiah reference oft used in Church talks and rhetoric.

Moreover, The Well & The Lighthouse, with its line “Resurrected/Living in a lighthouse/If you leave the ships are gonna wreck…The lions and the lambs ain’t sleeping yet”, appropriates the lighthouse imagery from “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy” (Hymn #335) and looks forward to the Millennial day when “the lion and lamb shall lie down together” (another Isaiah allusion; Butler, at least, has taken seriously Christ’s admonition to “search ye the words of Isaiah”).

I also couldn’t help but hear Butler (quite justifiably) sing against the current blight of MLMs, Summer Sales, and get-rich-quick schemes afflicting the North American saints in lines like “It cares not for your pyramid schemes” (from Black Mirror), “I don’t want the salesmen knocking at my door” (from Windowsill), and “You never trust a millionaire quoting the sermon on the mount” (from City With No Children In It from The Suburbs).

But the LDS allusions in their music largely taper off after that. I mostly ignored 2010’s The Suburbs because its their most boring album (and its Grammy for Album of the Year proves it). As for 2013’s Reflektor, I only speculated how the title track perhaps makes oblique reference to the sealing room of an LDS Temple, when Butler belts out “just a reflection of a reflection/of a reflection of a reflection/of a reflection” on the bridge.

As for their 2017 album Everything Now, I only noted how the deep-cut “Put Your Money On Me” contains suggestive lines like “Trumpets of angels call for my head”, and “Sitting on the carpets of the basement of heaven/We were born innocent, but it didn’t last a day”, which latter lyric could potentially be referencing the 2^nd Article of Faith, rejecting the doctrine of Original Sin while still acknowledging how little that actually helps us. But even that reading may have been a stretch. It was also around 2017 that I finally realized they were never going to top the one-two punch of their first 2 LPs, and so my Arcade Fire fandom drifted away.

Nevertheless, when their long-awaited follow-up WE was released earlier this month, my curiosity got the best of me, and I just had to give the album a listen, if for no other reason than to find out if there were any more of these uniquely LDS moments scattered therein. Spoiler alert: there aren’t–at least, nothing to the level of Neon Bible. In fact, the lyrics seemed to be more generic than ever; Arcade Fire have apparently forgotten that, as James Joyce once said, one must find the universal in the particular, not the other way around. Once upon a time in Antichrist Television Blues, for example, Arcade Fire expressed the passions of religious doubt through the oddly-specific story of Joe Simpson pushing his daughters into show-business–but that particularity is precisely what made the song feel so universal!

Such in fact used to be Arcade Fire’s calling card: their ability to wring such widely-resonant emotions from such hyper-specific stories, such as that of a runaway older brother “scratch[ing] our names out/from all his letters” on “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)“, or of a mother killed in a car accident causing the surviving daughter acute amaxophobia on “In the Backseat,” or retellings of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, or even of a suicidal young wannabe-starlet “fill[ing] up a bathtub and put[ting] on our first record” on “Creature Comforts.” On WE however, they are largely just going for the broadest possible emotional beats now, in a way clearly intended to be intimate but which ironically ends up feeling impersonal instead.

But that’s when it struck me, as I gave WE a cursory listen–the simplistic piano, the easy-to-sing-along midrange vocals^[3]Here there be none of the soaring vocals of Wake Up., the generic heart-on-sleeve lyrics, the unabashed preaching and moralizing to the kids these days to turn off the TV and quit the internet and be your best self in these apocalyptic latter-days:

WE is an EFY album.

Those of you who served missions in the ’90s or 2000s will recall with me how ingratiatingly omnipresent EFY CDs were back in the day–that in fact it was a marker of how long you’d been out on your mission when you found yourself starting to unironically enjoy these slices of obvious cheese^[4]EFY counselors are in fact instructed to “embrace the cheese”. Even today, I still have a soft spot for Peter Breinholdt, despite my deep-seated suspicions of the rah-rah emotionalism-masquerading-as-spirituality that Especially For Youth fosters in general.

But it is not my purpose to denigrate EFY–at least, not today. Right now, I want to solely restrict myself to noting that Arcade Fire has at last come full circle, and produced an EFY album in the style of the ones that were being released when Win Butler first left the Church, moved to Montreal, and started a band in the first place. Pitchfork‘s recent review of WE notes how many of the song ideas deployed on this album had been circulating among the band members since their college years–that is, the late-90s/early-2000s, which not-coincidentally was also the hey-day of the EFY CD. As Vladimir Nabokov once said of James Joyce’s Catholicism, Win Butler left his religion but not its categories. A full 20 years later, he has finally, inadvertently, produced an EFY album of his very own. (I mean, he references Christ walking on water on The Lightning II, and it’s not clear that such is even intended ironically!)

WE is an Arcade Fire EFY album. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing depends entirely upon your own relationship to EFY CDs, Arcade Fire, and/or both.