Neon Bible

Eleven tracks, and the frame is compelled. Black Mirror must open, a dread overture in which the band’s sound arrives as a storm before it arrives as song; My Body Is a Cage must close, the one place the record’s fear turns inward into the body and is answered by the organ. Intervention, (Antichrist Television Blues) and No Cars Go are load-bearing, each saying what nothing else on the record says. The subtractive test bites in the middle. The Well and the Lighthouse restates the sea of Ocean of Noise in a busier tune and could go with little loss; the title track is a sketch that names the record rather than advancing it; Black Wave/Bad Vibrations joins two halves that answer each other only loosely. About a quarter of the record is permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: in the years after 2001, faith, the screen and the state work as one apparatus that sells fear and asks obedience in return, and the self inside it is tempted to flee rather than to understand. Two songs state it best. Intervention sets the church beside the war over a funeral organ, its speaker “working for the church” while what he loves is lost: vocation as complicity. (Antichrist Television Blues) is a father talking himself into selling his daughter to television, the self-justifying voice exact, the condition shown from inside. Elsewhere the record surveys more than it articulates. The mirror, the screen and the flood stand as emblems, and the statement is often general, closer to a mood of dread than to a meaning that holds under pressure.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Elevation is the record’s chief good and comes often, mostly of the dreadful and the anthemic kind. Intervention is the summit: the organ entering at full stops, the voice climbing against it, the whole band swelling into what sounds like a congregation that has lost its faith and kept its hymn. My Body Is a Cage builds from a near-whisper to the organ’s full weight and a choir, a real terror turned into release. No Cars Go reaches the exultant kind, its long coda of voices and strings a flight made sound. Keep the Car Running has a driving lift, Black Mirror an ominous grandeur. What holds the figure below the high band is that several heights are reached by mass and volume, the same climbing crescendo applied more than once, rather than by a turn the listener did not expect.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Myth is everywhere evoked and in two places built. The frame is apocalyptic and biblical: the flood and the ocean, the Antichrist, the church, the mirror of vanity, the well and the lighthouse, a deluge of images in which the end is always about to come. Most of this is atmosphere. (Antichrist Television Blues) builds: a father offering his child to the screen is the sacrifice of Isaac turned to commerce, and the figure bears load because the father is particular, in his job, his reasoning and his prayer, and the archetype is the song’s structure rather than its decoration. My Body Is a Cage builds the old figure of the soul imprisoned in flesh, particular in its love and its want, and resolves it in a plea to be set free. No Cars Go evokes a promised land. Built in two songs, allusive in the rest.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own first record, Funeral (2004), and behind it heartland rock and the gothic of the pipe organ. The turn is from the private grief of a first record to public dread, and from a homemade sound to a larger, darker, more produced one: the church as studio, the organ as an instrument of the band, the voice addressing the nation rather than the neighbourhood. The stake was real: a second record after a debut hailed as a landmark, and a political one at a time when indie rock seldom risked statement. What holds it is the path. Keep the Car Running owes Springsteen openly, the gothic organ belongs to older rock, and the crescendo method is the band’s own, carried over and enlarged. The departure is in scale and subject more than in language.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Change the form and part of what the record knows goes. A record about fear sold by institutions is made inside a church and given the church’s instrument, so that the organ of Intervention and My Body Is a Cage is both the voice of the institution and the voice of the self pleading against it; a dry, secular sound would know less. The sequence is counted here, once. It opens in a mirror and a storm, moves through the sea songs of the middle, turns to escape in Windowsill and No Cars Go, and closes not with escape but with the body as cage, so that the flight the tenth track promises is answered by the eleventh. That ending is the record’s best formal stroke. What holds the figure is the middle, where three songs follow by shared imagery more than by necessity and another order would cost little.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Evidence first, and nineteen years supply some. The record has been returned to steadily; Intervention, No Cars Go and My Body Is a Cage are still sung and covered, and Peter Gabriel’s orchestral recording of My Body Is a Cage (2010) showed that song bearing a different setting, a real sign of depth in one song. The arrangements repay close listening in places: the hurdy-gurdy and mandolin under Keep the Car Running, the layers in the coda of No Cars Go. Semantically the yield is narrower. Once the apparatus of fear has been read, most songs do not reorganise on return, and statements so general are exhausted sooner than the sounds that carry them. Critical attention has mostly ranked the record against Funeral rather than reopened it. Depth is real in three or four songs and modest across the whole.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The field is the rock album of the 2000s, and the contest is with indie rock’s scale and its reticence: whether a band from that world could make a record as large, as earnest and as public as the arena tradition, without irony. The intrinsic force is real and bounded. The record showed that the orchestral, communal indie sound could carry a public subject and fill a large room, but Funeral had already shown the sound, and the anthemic means came from Springsteen and older rock. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record helped carry the band and its massed-vocal, many-instrument manner toward the arena and the charts, and Peter Gabriel recorded My Body Is a Cage in 2010. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the wave of bands with group shouts and strings that followed is traced chiefly to Funeral, and no practice can be shown to have turned on this record.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Survival is weighed over nineteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print and streamed, heard as an album. Presence is real: three of its songs remain in the band’s sets and in wider use, and the record is commonly listed among the albums of its decade; popularity is presence, not proof. It is narrower than the presence of Funeral, in whose shadow it is mostly heard, and the band’s mixed later standing does not lift it. The surface is charged: the record is fixed to the Bush years, to the Iraq war and to the televangelist and celebrity media of the mid 2000s, and Windowsill and Intervention are plainly of their moment, though the apparatus they describe has not gone away.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and in places load-bearing. The organ of Intervention is recorded with real weight and set so that the band swells into it rather than fighting it; My Body Is a Cage is paced exactly, its long withholding making the organ’s entry count. No Cars Go is a better arrangement than its earlier version, every added part, strings, horns and massed voices, given a place in the climb. Keep the Car Running drives on mandolin and hurdy-gurdy without losing its pulse. The costs are real. The mix is often dense to the point of murk: in Black Mirror, Black Wave/Bad Vibrations and The Well and the Lighthouse the many instruments smear, and the voice, pushed hard, loses shape. And the crescendo, applied again and again, becomes a habit.

Score: 8.1 / 10

One law governs most of the record: fear sold from above, and the self’s choice between flight and submission, heard through water, screens and church. Take the two most distant elements, the hushed, nearly spoken title track and the exultant coda of No Cars Go. They obey the law: one is the neon scripture, the other the escape it provokes, and My Body Is a Cage binds them by showing that the escape cannot be made from the body. Chassagne’s lead on Black Wave fits as the same dread from another angle. The law loosens where Keep the Car Running, an anthem of flight cheerful in sound, sits early against a sequence that later treats flight darkly, and where No Cars Go, a song of 2003, brings an innocence the rest of the record has given up. The range is moderate, the palette largely dark.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The state at war, in Intervention and Windowsill; the church and its commerce, in Intervention and the title track; the media and celebrity, in (Antichrist Television Blues) and Black Mirror; the family, as a father and a daughter; the body and the soul, in My Body Is a Cage; the natural order as threat, the sea of Ocean of Noise and Black Wave. That is a wide span for an album, and the frame of an apparatus of fear joins several orders: the church is the state’s partner, the screen the church’s pulpit. What holds the figure is integration. The orders arrive song by song, labour enters only as the father’s job, history only as the present war, and much is held by naming an institution rather than showing it at work.

Score: 7.5 / 10