Reflektor

Thirteen tracks on two discs, and the frame is compelled. Reflektor must open, setting the thesis and the dance-floor method at once; the Orpheus and Eurydice pair must head the second disc; Afterlife must come near the end, where the descent asks what survives death. Here Comes the Night Time and its slow reprise on the second disc are a real design, the carnival heard again from below. What holds this lowest of the twelve is the subtractive test, which bites hard elsewhere. Flashbulb Eyes is a sketch of the title track’s idea; Normal Person and You Already Know could go and leave the argument whole. Supersymmetry’s long ambient tail is permitted, not required. Some eighteen to twenty-five per cent of the record could be removed with little loss, and several long tracks run past what their material needs.

Score: 7.1 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in an age of reflection, connection is sought through images that only return the self, and the record asks whether love, sex and grief can still reach another person through them. The title track sets it plainly, a connection that turns out to be “just a reflektor”, with two voices trading across the mirror. Porno gives the sharpest case, a male desire formed by images and a lover asked to meet it; Afterlife turns the question to grief, whether love outlasts a death or only its image does. These findings are particular and exact, and the dance floor discloses both sides, communion and display at once. Held below the top: the condition is often stated as slogan on the lesser tracks, and the general thesis was common by 2013.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Elevation comes often and is mostly of one kind, the transport of a dance that will not stop. The title track builds over seven minutes from a nervous pulse to the entry of Bowie’s voice and a saxophone-led climax, the record’s first height. Here Comes the Night Time rises twice: the opening frenzy of carnival percussion, then the slowed verse that explodes again. Awful Sound reaches a wide, choral climax after its long build. It’s Never Over drives through the dialogue of the two singers to a real exultation, and Afterlife, the warmest height, lifts its question on a rhythm that keeps rising. The dreadful kind is rarer; the slow Night Time reprise and the descent of the second disc touch it. Level stretches are many for a record this long.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Myth is built in one place and it bears the record’s weight. The second disc is laid on the descent of Orpheus: Eurydice’s song and Orpheus’s answer stand at its head, and the looking back, the act that loses her, is the record’s own word, reflection, made into the fatal act, so that the myth and the thesis are one figure. Afterlife asks the myth’s question in the voice of a modern couple, whether the dead can be followed. The particular holds: the two lovers are sung by a married pair, and the Rodin cover sets the frame. Around it Joan of Arc, the carnival with its locked heaven and the mirror of Narcissus are evoked. Held below the gate because the Orpheus songs lend the myth’s names to love songs more than they narrate it, and the first disc’s carnival is atmosphere.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own manner, the anthemic, choral indie rock of its first three albums, with Springsteen and Bowie behind it. The turn is real and wide: toward the dance floor with a dance producer, toward Haitian rara rhythm and carnival percussion, toward the double album and an ironic alter ego. The stake was real too. The band’s previous record had won the largest prize in its field, and this one wagered the audience and the earnestness the band was loved for. What holds the figure: the path was proven. Remain in Light, Achtung Baby and Zooropa, and the producer’s own records, had shown a rock band turning to the dance floor and to Caribbean or African rhythm, and the turn imports a language more than it invents one.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. The two discs are two worlds: the first the reflective age as a party, loud and lit and surface; the second the underworld of the Orpheus songs, slower, more synthetic, more private. The Night Time reprise is the hinge, the party heard from below, and a record about reflection is built to mirror itself, in paired titles and a reprise. The dance form argues as well: a record asking whether connection survives display makes its listeners dance in public. The sequence is counted here, once. Held from the top because the form is in places a container: the middle of the first disc is a run of songs in different idioms with no formal reason for their place, and several tracks run as long as the groove permits rather than as long as they know.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Evidence first, over thirteen years, and the span supplies little of it. The production repays return: the percussion layers of Here Comes the Night Time and the title track, the detail of the mixes, the voices half buried under the groove of Afterlife. The Orpheus layer and the reflection theme give a listener something to work, and the pairing of titles rewards attention to the sequence; a record built as a mirror is heard differently once the mirror is seen. Semantically the yield is narrower: the satire of Normal Person and Flashbulb Eyes is spent on first hearing, and the theme, once grasped, does not reorganise on return. No sustained critical re-examination can be shown, and the record is commonly placed below the band’s first and third albums.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The field is the indie and alternative rock album of the early 2010s, and the band’s own place at its head. Intrinsic force: the record showed that the largest band of that field could carry rara percussion and a dance producer’s sound into a double album and keep its audience, and it carried its idiom further than any record of the band before it. That widens the band’s idiom more than it reorganises the field, since the dance turn of indie rock was a decade old by 2013, led by the producer’s own work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely heard and its release much talked of, but no practice, sound or school can be named that turned on it, and Haitian rhythm cannot be shown to have entered the field through it.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record exists as released, in print and streamed. Presence is real and narrowing: the title track, Afterlife and Here Comes the Night Time are still heard, but the album is played whole less than the band’s earlier work, and attention to the band’s catalogue has narrowed in later years. The fabric is fixed to its year in parts: the 2013 disco sound of its production and the costume campaign that launched it belong to their moment, though the hand-played percussion ages better. The span sits at the bottom of its row, and the charges on presence take it a tenth under that row’s usual figure: a tenth under m b v, at 8.0, of the same year.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high on the best tracks and uneven across the whole. The title track is the best made: a bass and percussion pulse held for seven minutes without going slack, voices placed in two languages, Bowie’s entry timed, the saxophone and strings set into the groove. Here Comes the Night Time’s tempo changes, hand drums over a band, are exact; Afterlife’s rhythm section and layered voices are the record’s warmest construction. Murphy’s production keeps a large band and a percussion section legible. The faults fall across a real share of the record: Normal Person’s stomp is loose, You Already Know is generic, the mixes of the first disc are sometimes crowded, Win Butler’s narrow voice carries more than it can, and Supersymmetry’s tail is texture without construction.

Score: 8.1 / 10

One law governs the record: the self seeking another person through a surface that only reflects, at the party and then in the underworld. Take the two most distant elements, the carnival frenzy of Here Comes the Night Time and the ambient drift that closes Supersymmetry. They obey it: crowd and solitude are the two sides of the mirror, and the end dissolves the party into reflection. Porno and Afterlife obey it closely, and the two discs answer each other as surface and depth. The range is wide, garage rock, disco, rara, synth ballad and ambient, and the law reaches across most of it. What holds it: the law loosens in the middle of the first disc, where Normal Person and You Already Know obey only their genres, Joan of Arc stands somewhat apart, and the turn between discs sometimes reads as a change of mood.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for being an album. Consciousness is held, as the self in a hall of images. Erotic love and marriage are held in the dialogue songs and in Porno, the most exact of them. The family enters in We Exist, a son asking his father for recognition. Death and grief are held in Afterlife and the Orpheus songs; the sacred in the missionaries and the locked heaven of Night Time and in Joan of Arc; history and the state glimpsed through Haiti’s carnival and its missionaries. The media age frames them all, and the reflection theme joins several orders under one condition. That is a wider span than most albums hold. What holds it: most orders arrive song by song, Haiti is a sound more than a place, and labour and the natural order are absent.

Score: 7.6 / 10