Arcade Fire

And they didn’t stop at a Hungarian orchestra: A military men’s choir recorded vocals for “No Cars Go” and future B-side “Surf City Eastern Bloc.” Elsewhere, Wolf Parade’s Hadji Baraka adds “bleeps and bloops”; Calexico’s Martin Wenk and Jacob Valenzuela play trumpet; other pals contribute French horn, or join Sarah Neufeld on violin. “[The elaborate arrangements] make me laugh sometimes,” Régine admits, “but at the same time, this is what I have in my head.” And then there’s the pipe organ.

“A few years ago,” says Win, leaning back in his chair, “a friend of Régine’s was caretaker at this church up in [Montreal’s] Little Italy, so Régine got to play the organ at midnight.”

“Two in the morning!” she interrupts, “Full blast! Absolute full blast!”

“Normally you think of organ with just a couple of stops open,” says Win. “It’s like a flute—gentle. But with all the stops pulled it’s got this really aggressive sound. I knew that for ‘Intervention’ it was really going to be about the organ. We found a church, St-Jean Baptiste on [Rue] Rachel...”

“I had to listen to the band on my headphones extremely loud,” Régine interrupts, “because the organ was so loud. And the reverb had an eight-second delay.” She mimes as she speaks, fingers spread on the tabletop. “It was almost like being a surgeon doing a new operation, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and if I screw up anything then the person’s dead. It was one take. You couldn’t cut it piece by piece. No mistakes.”

The result is a heavy, haunting song, the organ at once mournful and bristling. “It’s like a hymn,” Win says. It’s the track they’re mixing the day I visit. We sit in the balcony-turned-control-room overlooking the church’s main hall, and amid racks of blinking lights, the band listens and listens, engineer Nick Launay taking their notes and making the tiniest adjustments. Later I watch as Régine works alone with Launay, scowling as she scrutinizes every single glockenspiel hit.

The hall below is the main tracking room, where most of the recording has taken place. There are a dozen guitars, mandolins and drum kits, a hurdy-gurdy and steel drums and Owen’s harpsichord. On the rear wall there hangs a neon crucifix, a cross in blue and white. Neon Bible, Win says, “is addressing religion in a way that only someone who actually cares about it can. It’s really harsh at times, but from the perspective of someone who thinks it has value.”

Win and his brother were raised as Mormons, and Win studied Theology at university, but Neon Bible is not a Mormon album, a Christian album or even a particularly pious one. Instead it’s a record thick with questions about fear and faith, and songs of love and disappointment directed at other human beings as much as at the Divine. “There are two kinds of fear: The Bible talks a lot about fear of God—fear in the face of something awesome. That kind of fear is the type of fear that makes someone want to change. But a fear of other people makes you want to stay the same, to protect what you have. It’s a stagnant fear; and it’s paralyzing.”

Neon Bible is an album about both these types of fear, from its grappling with the sublime in “Black Wave/Bad Vibrations’” to its condemnation of a certain side of America in “Windowsill,” in which the Texas-born Win insists, “I don’t want fear at my windowsill.” “(Antichrist Television Blues),” meanwhile, is a Dylan-esque character study—a “good Christian man” reminiscent of Jessica Simpson’s manager/father, praying for his daughter to become a star.

Thematically, Funeral was burdened more by hopes than by fears. Neon Bible is darker. If that first album was the sound of young people shaking themselves free, Neon Bible is the disillusionment of those who have escaped and yet still find themselves lost. “My body is a cage,” Win sings on the song of the same name. (“The most instant song we’ve ever written,” he says, “one of the few times when it was like, ‘yup, that was exactly what I was trying to say.’”) Meanwhile in the band’s updated version of “No Cars Go,” a new line has been inserted—“Don’t know where we’re goin’,” in a tone that’s in no way reassuring.

On the night of January 29, Arcade Fire plays at a church in London—its first public concert in more than a year. After the encore, the band troops through the crowd and out a side door, Richard lugging his double bass. This is an old Arcade Fire trick, and those who are savvy follow them outside. It’s night and Westminster is quiet. At the top of the old stairs they play a hushed, acoustic version of “Wake Up,” the bellowed original transformed into a lullaby. Around them everyone is humming, singing, warming themselves in the moment. It’s a scene of communion that feels in direct opposition to Neon Bible’s estrangement: a hundred people trying so hard together to remember these seconds.

“My grandma just passed away a couple weeks ago,” Win told me in Montreal. “She grew up in Hawaii but moved back to the [continental U.S.] when she was 15. By the end, she had pretty bad Alzheimer’s. But even when she couldn’t remember my dad’s name, she could still play these 3-chord songs on her ukelele. She remembered every word.”

Régine watches her husband. “When I was 15,” she says, “I would hear Bob Dylan songs ... I barely spoke English. I probably got 10 percent of it, just the basic words—‘babe’ and ‘door.’” She looks at her hands on the tablecloth, how her fingers meet the pattern. She lifts her eyes to mine. “But I could tell that there was something important there.”

In Farnham, letters sometimes arrive without stamps. They’re rare (“the people in Farnham couldn’t care less,” Win says), but every now and then something arrives from a neighbor—a local kid who’s experienced a moment like that one in London, or who heard “something important” when an Arcade Fire song came on the radio one day. Maybe the writer plays a little bass guitar, maybe they’re just volunteering to cook the band some potato soup. Arcade Fire reads these letters, and they pin them to the fridge. Some, they answer. But, me, I just imagine the pilgrims, tentative and hopeful, cycling up to the Petite Église at night and cupping their hands to the walls, wondering what prayers might find their way through the red brick to their ears.