Win Butler and Co, you sure know how to whip us into a frenzy. Months of tiny morsels being drip fed to us generated trepidation and excitement in equal measure. How would the masses perceive LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy on the controls, David Bowie making a guest appearance and it being a double album? Now that Arcade Fire‘s ‘Reflektor’ has arrived we can see Murphy’s fingerprints all over this album, and not just in the obvious disco beats we expected from the single Reflektor. It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus) and Porno also bristle with energy with their deep rumbling bass lines.

The decision to go with James Murphy in hindsight looks like such an obvious choice as a band can continue mining the same musical veins for only so long before they hit dirt and Arcade Fire had gone as far as they could up to ‘The Suburbs’. Butler admits as much asking “Do you like rock and Roll music, because I don’t know if I do” on the intro to Normal Person. Something had to change but without a total disconnection to the past.

We Exist musically and lyrically feels like the one song from ‘Reflektor’ that most feels like a natural extension from ‘The Suburbs’, where Butler continues the themes of isolation explored on ‘The Suburbs’. “Doubting is fine, I’m used to them now, but tell me why they treat me like this?” he sings.

However, there is no one single style that binds ‘Reflektor’ together. We get carnival like steel drum percussion on Here Comes The Night Time, the tribal Haitian rhythms of Afterlife and fuzzed out indie stomp of Joan Of Arc. If this wasn’t diverse enough already, the jaunty You Already Know is singularly the most dance-able song they have produced with added weirdness off a certain former BBC chat show host introducing it. Normally the presence of Jonathan Ross on a song would be as welcome as a fart at a funeral but it’s largely unobtrusive in this case.

The second half of the album is not nearly as propulsive as the first but this was a conscious decision by the band as they wanted each half to be a different experience. Even with nearly an hour and a quarter’s worth of music Reflektor’ feels shorter and more accessible than ‘The Suburbs‘ but it is inevitable that such a lengthy album is going to fall short at some point. Supersymmetry and even Reflektor could have been more tightly condensed and lost none of their impact, while Flashbulb Eyes shuffling reggae isn’t a total success.

Arcade Fire have shown that they have the capacity to surprise us and keep us guessing as to where they will turn next. Crucially quality control overall has not dipped  and ‘Reflektor’ is still definitively Arcade Fire, moving forward without leaving us behind.