New Arcade Fire record proving divisive, drawing raves, pans from critics

TORONTO – The reviews are in, and Arcade Fire’s sprawling new opus “Reflektor” has critics deeply divided.

The 75-minute, two-disc follow-up to the Montreal band’s Grammy-winning hit “The Suburbs” has received some raves, but perhaps not the near-universal praise of their past work.

On the positive side, influential music website Pitchfork — one of Arcade Fire’s earliest champions — lavished the album with a 9.2 review, concluding that “Reflektor” is “an album that dares to be great, and remarkably succeeds.”

Rolling Stone was also effusive with its 4 1/2-star advance review — released far earlier than any other — comparing the indie darlings’ latest to such “turning-point classics” as U2’s “Achtung Baby” and Radiohead’s “Kid A.”

More qualified praise was awarded from Spin, which called the album “long and weird and indulgent and deeply committed” in an eight-out-of-10 review, and the New York Times, which noted that “some of the tracks go on longer than necessary, but it’s an excess of generosity.”

One didn’t have to look far for a negative counter-balance, however.

In a shrugging three-out-of-five-star review, the Guardian criticized the record’s length and ultimately declared that “Reflektor” “sounds like the work of a band that have plenty of good ideas, but increasingly can’t tell them from their bad ones — or won’t be told.”

Entertainment Weekly and Q magazine were similarly ambivalent, while Grantland — a popular culture-focused offshoot of ESPN — called the record “the most distended, most fumbling and most distant editation of Arcade Fire yet.”

Yet the harshest criticism was reserved for a scathing Washington Post op-ed that declared that the band “still sound like gigantic dorks with boring sex lives” and ultimately summed the new record up as “square, sexless, deeply unstylish, painfully obvious rock music.”

Even with the mixed notices, review aggregator has “Reflektor” pegged at an 81 overall score from critics, which qualifies as “universal acclaim” — even if it is the lowest score assigned for any of Arcade Fire’s four albums.