If there's one band that should be able to defy the so-called sophomore slump, it's Montreal's Arcade Fire.
The experimental, indie-pop collective's 2004 debut, Funeral, saw their unique, dense sound win over such famous fans as David Bowie, David Byrne, U2 and Coldplay, while critics raced to put their album in year-end top 10 lists.
Not that the group itself believed any of the hype at the height of it.
"The making-fun-of-ourselves level is pretty high in this band," said band member Jeremy Gara on the phone from Montreal recently. "We just want to have a clear head about the insane world that we are in now. You have to laugh about it. The minute we start to take ourselves too seriously it's definitely the end of the road."
Still, the group's follow-up record, Neon Bible, in stores Tuesday, is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated albums in Canada this year, if not the world.
"With the last record it was kind of neat," said band member Tim Kingsbury, also down the line from Montreal. "We started touring in a van and we were just playing little clubs and stuff, but the shows were going really well, we were selling out, and it was pretty gradual. People would post things on their blogs or whatever and it sort of picked up like that. And on that tour there were a few moments that were kind of surreal like when we played on David Letterman or when David Bowie came to meet us. When that kind of thing was going on, it didn't really change anything. It sort of allowed us to do this for a living, but it hasn't had much of a change on the way we write songs or plan shows."
Neon Bible got its title from a novel of the same name by John Kennedy Toole, the same author of A Confederacy of Dunces.
The new disc was mostly recorded in a church-turned-Masonic Lodge that the band bought at the end of the last tour and converted into a studio. It's located in a little town in the Eastern Townships outside of Montreal.
"There's so much emphasis on the sophomore album and all that kind of s--t," said Gara. "It's weird. We really did the whole album without thinking about any of that, and it's sort of a blessing and a curse. Like we're the most blessed bunch of people where we're in a position that people will relate to the record, hopefully, without us having to push it, you know what I mean? We really just disappeared for a year and shut the door to everyone and just did a record and tweaked it until we were totally happy with it."
Some parts of Neon Bible were also recorded in New York (Texas-born frontman Win Butler's vocals), Budapest (for a Hungarian's men's choir and orchestra) and London (some group vocals and mixing and mastering the album).
Naturally, the success of Funeral, which has sold about 500,000 copies, and the never-ending tour that followed enabled the band to flex their musical muscles even more on the followup record.
"I think the only pressure we feel is from ourselves," said Kingsbury. "We wanted to record songs that we're happy with and I think we did that. I don't think you can do anymore than that. If we got too caught up in trying to figure out what everybody wanted, it's just impossible to think about it that way."
Added Gara: "All the deadlines for this record have been completely self-imposed. We don't have to answer to anyone, which is so incredible. It's such a gift and that definitely had a lot to do with Funeral (being) as successful as it was. It was like, 'Oh, we can just do anything we want.' And we should do anything we want. I mean we've been given this opportunity to challenge ourselves and play with funny instruments and do all this crazy s--t, might as well do it. Bands from Montreal, I find, don't limit themselves to the ideas that they have, like no matter how f---ing crazy it is."
Needless to say, producers were lined up around the block to work with Arcade Fire on Neon Bible and the band did have their own short list that they considered working with, but ultimately decided against it.
"There's pretty much five or six producers built into the band, so just adding another person into the mix can be a little overkill," said Kingsbury. "The one area I think it is useful is for time management. A producer can just sort of guide you, if you hit a dead end with an idea, it can be kind of good to say, 'Well, let's leave it for now and come back at it later and work on this right now.' But I think we did pretty well on our own."
The band's chief songwriters Win Butler and his wife Regine Chassagne did some writing for Neon Bible on the road over the last couple of years while other songs, like No Cars Go, which was recorded for an earlier demo, were reshaped for the new album.
A church theme abounds -- not surprising given where it was recorded. The band played many of their warmup gigs in their church-turned studio last month, and some of the album's songs feature pipe organs.
"There's definitely a sense of church in the record," said Kingsbury. "The album you can kind of take from it what you like, really."
Added Gara: "Us recording in a church, we had an idea for the pipe organ before that even happened. But Win and Regine, when I first met them, were always talking about if we could ever live in a church that'd be amazing. It's meant to be a place of community and of that special something that is intangible -- spirituality, openness -- and you're really just supposed to feel things, whether it be music, whether it be performance or your faith. I mean, it definitely penetrated the sound of the album." \
