3 New Albums #1- Arcade Fire, Deradoorian, Pink Floyd
Although the word "new" is doing some heavy lifting in the case of the Floyd.
The only connection between these three records is that they came out this week, but they do go quite nicely together.
This is purely accidental.
I would have much preferred the first of this series to have comprised albums from 3 different continents in 3 different genres and 3 or more different languages. Maybe next time. But for now, there are records out from a couple of my fave raves which I couldn’t ignore.
There is a new record by Arcade Fire, which is always welcome.
Pink Floyd are still mining their back catalogue like there’s no tomorrow, and if it means the first stand-alone release of their most legendary gig, then why not?
And Brooklynite Angel Deradoorian, sometime member of Dirty Projectors, releases her latest album, either her third or fourth depending on whether you count the even-more-experimental-than-usual Ticket To Fame which she recorded with Kate NV.
Pink Elephant - Arcade Fire (2025)
I’m not a fan of albums that are too long.
There’s fun to be had in going through Arcade Fire’s “Fat Album” period offerings The Suburbs (64 minutes) and Reflektor (75 minutes) with the intention of trimming them down to manageable proportions.
This is a useful exercise for many artists - the Red Hot Chili Peppers in particular spring to mind. Good band in their time, sure, but their habit of stretching out one musical idea over 70-75 minutes got more than a little wearing.
Albums should fit on one side of a C-90 cassette. There’s a reason they made cassettes that length. 1
And don’t get me started on how Oasis’ derided Be Here Now album would actually be their finest work if all the songs were reduced in length by one third.2
Arcade Fire’s most recent albums Everything Now and We have thankfully abandoned that trend, clocking in at 47 minutes and their latest Pink Elephant brings that down to 42 lean, mean minutes. After a few listens I’d say it doesn’t have an ounce of filler.
The first two tracks are merely OK. Open Your Heart Or Die Trying has a poundshop Sea Power feel to it while Pink Elephant lopes along slowly, nothing to frighten the horses but also nothing to push things forward.
I’m not gonna lie, given all the extra-band stuff that’s gone on since the previous album, I was definitely looking for a Rumours for the modern age.
I don’t know if this is that, but surely it’s no coincidence that the first duet on the record, Year Of The Snake, is the first really interesting track. This is classic Arcade Fire from start to finish - chanting, odd guitar figures, a motorik beat that builds and builds before ending suddenly - with one improvement.
Regine Chassagne’s singing.
My God, she’s got so much better over the years since she seemed to be elbowing her way into the band dynamic without a by your leave. There’s a confidence there that I never heard on the early records, great as they were.
After this, the album’s triumphant three-track peak, to these ears anyway. Circle Of Trust seems to be making another statement about that other stuff with the husband-and-wife vocalists singing mainly in unison.
This is followed by two tracks with rhyming titles Alien Nation and Beyond Salvation 3 which have echoes of Side One and Side Two respectively of onetime AF collaborator David Bowie’s Low album.
There’s a lot of residual Bowie around Arcade Fire. It’s as if he left a musical Horcrux buried inside one of the band members when he passed on.
And speaking of rock legends the band have worked with, Ride Or Die and I Love Her Shadow come across as nothing less than a couple of wistful, almost lo-fi Bruce Springsteen covers
I could take you anywhere, wind is blowing back our hair
I could work an office job, you could be a waitress
Before the big finish, there’s She Cries Diamond Rain, a 1:27 bridge which gets a credit as a song in its own right, before the 7-minute plus finale Stuck In My Head. I’ve rarely heard anything as compelling as Win Butler’s crazed-preacher exhortation.
Get the fuck out of bed, get the fuck out of bed, get the fuck out of bed,
Clean up your heart, clean up your heart, clean up your heart.
It may just be recency bias (four days ago I hadn’t heard it yet ), but I think this is one of the best songs they’ve ever recorded. Come back in twenty years and I’ll say for sure.
Deradoorian - Ready For Heaven (2025)
You built a time machine, Angel Deloorian.
The alchemist Angel Deradoorian’s brilliant new record mines a number of different sources, mixing them into a whole that is never dull and always entirely satisfying.
The first track Storm In My Brain starts with a bassline reminiscent of The Beatles’ Paperback Writer, which gives way to what sounds like a punk record with the guitar parts removed, This then sets the tone for how eclectic this music is.
Deradoorian is on one of the finest indie labels still standing - Fire Records, home of The Nightingales, Jane Weaver, Whitney K, Lemonheads, Dream Syndicate, and the criminally underrated Stealing Sheep. Of course she is.
In the words of the Fire Records publicity department:
It is a classic forty minute set of inquisitive pop songs, blessed with a lightness of touch and a sharp focus that can’t help but charm the listener.
Now this is a perfect summing-up of the record. These tunes could be done acoustically, with a guitar band or even a full soul band dammit, and they would sound good…
It conjures up some last, faint afterglow of the old belief that an electronic, programmed beat can smash itself – and you – into another, more egalitarian consciousness.
…but yeah, the clean motorik beat which permeates most tracks on the record is the perfect accompaniment to Deladoorian’s voice.
That voice, though… varying throughout, for example over the course of the central Tracks 5-7 going from sweet and soulful (No No Yes Yes), then all breathy goth a la Anna Calvi (Digital Gravestone) and on to - I kid you not - a creditable Sandy Denny impression on Set Me Free, with a 70s folk-rock madrigal backing to match.
This record genuinely sounds like somebody setting out not to make great art but to make great tunes, taking inspiration from wherever she finds it.
I think this quote from Deladoorian on her process is telling:
“I love the production more than the songwriting. […] In fact, I don’t even feel like a songwriter at times, I feel like someone who is just inspired by so much music. And I want to try it all out! Like Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Mingus, or ESG and Silver Apples, or making weird krautrock and industrial music. I love dub, and Sly and Robbie. I love the productions of those records and the collective energies released by their creators in the studio. It’s just a weird thing to do it by yourself!”
I love the honesty there, and the enthusiasm she still has, twenty years into a career. Hope she makes it over the pond for some live dates soon. Full band, please, Angel!
Pink Floyd - Live At Pompeii XCXLXXII (2025)
Not exactly a new album, the music here will be very familiar to Floyd-heads both from the 1972 Live At Pompeii movie and from its previous release as part of a box set.
The film documents the band setting up for and playing a gig at the Amphitheatre in the lost city of Pompeii in Italy, destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD, leaving the city buried under twenty feet of ash with the loss of nearly 20,000 lives.
Nobody attended the gig apart from the band, their crew and the film unit - the audience was literally composed of ghosts.
So they saved a bit of money on security. And the normal Pink Floyd audience reaction of frenzied dancing in the aisles was absent on this occasion.4
This was the band’s last recording as a democracy, ironically filmed in a Roman amphitheatre just before Roger Waters pretty much declared himself Emperor and took over the running of the group himself.
All the songs on this recording are available elsewhere in varying and often superior versions, both studio and live.
In particular, Careful With That Axe, Eugene, A Saucerful Of Secrets and Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun - suffer by direct comparison with the versions recorded three years earlier in Birmingham and Manchester for the live half of the Ummagumma double album. You just don’t get the same level of tension in the playing when there is nobody there to impress, or indeed to point and laugh if mistakes are made.
There are so many legitimate Floyd bootlegs around covering the 1967-1972 period. You may be better off trawling Spotify for those, rather than shelling out for these slightly sterile versions (honorable exception for a rather good take on Echoes)
But at the end of the day, if you want a set capturing how Pink Floyd sounded just before the Dark Side Of The Moon sessions which propelled them into the stratosphere sales-wise, particularly in the USA, this is it. Just make sure to watch the film as well if you can.
Links
DERADOORIAN - "Ready For Heaven"
PINK FLOYD - "Live At Pompeii MCMLXXII
Ask yer dad. He probably used to do mixtapes, or “tapes” as we knew them then, for yer mum. I believe they are called “playlists” now, but they’re Not As Good.
This is not sarcasm.
This reminds me inexplicably of the paired titles of episodes of Doctor Who in the late Moffatt/Capaldi period. Hey, if you know, you know.
THIS is sarcasm.
I like the sound of all of these. I'm a big fan of Fire records.