THE REFLEKTORS
Roundhouse, London | November 12th
It can help, if you’re trying to coerce yourself into something bold and challenging, to get into character, to dress up a bit, to adopt a different persona. Sometimes that new, temporary identity might allow you to accomplish things you never thought possible. Sometimes you might even become that other.
The band who are grandly unveiled into the resplendent Roundhouse – where disco balls of varying sizes cascade from the domed ceiling and the audience are largely clad in tuxedos and ball gowns – simply isn’t the Arcade Fire. It’s just not. When opening DJ Don Letts’ bassline peters out and the curtain emblazoned with their new alias descends, it reveals not only thousands of tiny reflectors, glitter and mirrors coating every surface including Win Butler’s head, sending the countless camera flashes right back where they came from. It also reveals a sparkling cavalcade, totally unrecognisable if it weren’t for their very recognisable faces.
Once the yearning underdogs, Win and Regine Chassagne are re-realised as audacious strutting counterparts, interchanging at stage front like Dancing in the Street-era Bowie and Jagger. Richard Reed Parry looks every inch Napoleon Dynamite on prom night in his dapper red tux. The geeks have thrown their own party next door and it’s way, way better.
The way in which the four-strong percussion section lays down grooves as the band snake along, finding their way and settling into recesses, merging together into heady, swaying motion – the fact this has been developed, or learnt, is astounding, uncanny. Maybe that’s because this isn’t a new phase – it’s a new band; “We’re The Reflektors, we’re here all week”, Win declares (he presumably means in the country, rather than the venue). Or maybe it’s just because the Arcade Fire are one of the greatest bands of their era.
Reflektor lasts around 10 minutes before levelling out into that simple piano line, by which point half the room is doing the bogle while the other wipes away a tear. To be witnessing them in a venue of this size doesn’t feel bizarre. It’s definitely surreal, having seen them headline vast festival stages across the world. But somehow, this feels fitting. It feels personal, at points even scrappy, as if band are testing out audience and vice versa. Most of all, it feels honest.
A deep and dubby Flashbulb Eyes drops into a remarkable reimagining of the seminal Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out). Its emotive swells become an uplifting, heartwrenching stomp. None of the impact has been lost, but the subtlety with which the arrangements are shifted to cater for the new, syncopated, rhythmic approach is glorious. Turns out The Reflektors make a decent covers band too.
Tracks from the latest album continue to unfurl, with jaunty renditions of You Already Know and Joan of Arc, before the next true revelatory deluge. We Exist, with Win’s pretext of it as a song about coming out to one’s father, is sublime. It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus) revels in its depthy riff and powerful, evolving narrative, revealing perhaps the most layered and dramatic example of The Reflektors’ sound. But perhaps best of all is the staggering Afterlife. A song which on paper combines all the greatest features of both the Arcade Fire and The Reflektors, here it soars with earnest melody, all the while carried effortlessly by a constant barrage of snares and hi-hats. The drum fill which precedes the chorus, with its cry of “I’ve gotta know!”, strikes with such power, such immediacy. The first time, it hits you in the heart. You await its reappearance and it’s just as good; again and again, you never want it to end. But it does, in the end.
Win dedicates the next track towards Don Letts, still in his vantage point behind the sound desk (he replies with a typically understated nod), and the band launch into a textured, silly, brilliant rendition of The Clash’s I’m So Bored With the U.S.A. Win and Regine don huge papier-mache heads which come to life, bobbing around the stage like errant marionettes. Here Comes The Night Time is every bit the wild, undulating calypso double-time-half-time explosion you’d hope it to be. With Win’s big head cast to one side, looking on, devoid of lustre, the song surges into its final carnival burst, and cannons cast glitter upwards. It’s jubilant, and The Reflektors leave the stage.
They reemerge, of course, and Win proudly announces that having previously relied on sequencers, the band can now perform the next song entirely live, before retiring to join the gaggle of percussionists and affording Regine centre stage for the stunning Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) – the unofficial prequel to Reflektor. Already a revelation, Chassagne become a sassy, engrossing focal point, waving luminous ribbons through the air, stamping her feet and crossing her arms like a stroppy little girl, frustrated at the grand, poetic injustices of the song. The chorus, which has always presented a distinct meeting of outsider desperation and unfailing hope, carries all that significance and more.
As the band close on the swelling, creaking mass of Supersymmetry and Letts takes over with Dawn Penn’s No No No, it completes one of the most important musical inventions, reinventions, representations and reinterpretations in recent memory. They’re The Reflektors. They’re here all week.
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Words: Geraint Davies
Photo: Stuart Leech
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