A lot has been made of the musical marriage between LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy and Arcade Fire for the latter's fourth album Reflektor. Murphy's input is more custodial than perhaps previously thought, with the majority of the production legwork left to Markus Dravs, but nonetheless, Murphy's fingerprints are felt throughout, adding a sonic texture hitherto unheard on anything the Canadian sextet have released up until now.
Given their status as the world's finest purveyors of music thick with ideas, Reflektor is fittingly dense, filled with musical roundabouts but it lacks the same spectrum of colour that its predecessor The Suburbs boasted. It is a distinctly narrower sound than we're used to with Arcade Fire, but the trade-off for this is that it's unquestionably their most single-minded and focused record to date.
The album certainly has its high points. A cameo from Jonathan Ross (yep, seriously) leads us into 'You Already Know', a jaunty pop song which showcases both Win Butler's tremendous vocals and the multitudinous directions Arcade Fire are capable of taking their music. 'It's Never Over', the best song on the album, is - perhaps tellingly - the finest example on the record of tandem vocals between husband and wife duo Butler and Regine Chassange. It's also arguably the biggest signpost of Murphy's influence, too.
Clocking in at over 75 minutes, Reflektor is overlong but doesn't necessarily overstay its welcome - it just serves to highlight the length of time between the album's sparse highlights. One would be hesitant to call this a disappointment because it certainly isn't, but the inside segment of the Arcade Fire/James Murphy venn diagram is smaller than perhaps you might have liked.
