Arcade Fire’s Reflektor.

Arcade Fire’s last album, the 2010 Grammy-winning The Suburbs, remains one of the best albums I’ve ever heard, a cohesive collection of musically strong songs that offers a profound exploration of a serious theme without sacrificing the hooks and melodies that make a record commercially viable. The band took over three years to release its follow-up, the double album Reflektor, released on October 29th, working with producer James Murphy, better known as LCD Soundsystem. (No word on whether the furniture is still in the garage.) The resulting opus is ambitious and expansive, freewheeling where The Suburbs was tight, yet still carrying musical motifs across multiple tracks. It’s also frequently repetitive, often pretentious, and overall shockingly boring.

While the first disc begins with the hit disco-inflected single “Reflektor,” the best track on either half of the album, Arcade Fire immediately downshifts into slower-tempo material, as they did early on The Suburbs, but this time around they struggle to recapture any of the sense of urgency established in the opener. “Flashbulb Eyes” begins with the embarrassing couplet “What if the camera really do/take your soul?” (Is he mocking the speech of Africans who do or did once believe that about photography?), with a backing track with hints of Afro-Caribbean rhythms that move out front for “Here Comes the Night Time,” with cringeworthy steel drums that sound more like a parody of Carnival music. (Win Butler has said that the 1959 film Black Orpheus, which takes that Greek character’s myth and adapts it to a modern setting in Brazil during Carnival, was a major inspiration for this album.) By the time the album’s pace begins to pick back up with the garage-rocker “Normal Person,” over 15 minutes have passed since the opener and all of that energy has long dissipated.

Track length is a major problem here, as it was in Murphy’s solo work with LCD Soundsystem. No single track on The Suburbs ran past 5:25, yet nine of Reflektor‘s thirteen tracks exceed that length – and the two shortest tracks are throwaway interstitials rather than fully realized songs. An artist can succeed even with songs in the six to eight-minute range, but the songs have to be more complex, with different passages or movements to sustain the listener; this, for me, was always LCD Soundsystem’s major flaw, as an eight-bar drum-and-bass loop repeated for seven minutes and 27 seconds is just going to make me change the station before I even reach the halfway point. Here Arcade Fire try just that, extending ideas that would have worked well inside of four minutes into six-minute frameworks they can’t fill. “Porno” is a monstrosity, a lyrical and musical excrescence that should have been deleted from the studio’s hard drive, but “We Exist,” “Awful Sound,” and “Afterlife” all would have worked better in a shorter format, although none has the hook to rank among the album’s stronger tracks.

And there are strong tracks here, scattered throughout the album. “Normal Person” brings to mind influences from Pavement to Wire, with a cheerfully dissonant guitar riff in the chorus that comes crashing in like an early stem engine. “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)” is the best of the rambling tracks on disc two, with its Savages-like guitar line and something resembling a tempo change after the midpoint. “You Already Know” is reminiscent of the highs on The Suburbs and even Funeral with a revival chorus, although the peculiar pronunciation of the “d” in “already” – in phonetics terms, taking it from voiced to voiceless – was an unnecessary distraction.

Those distractions are the other fatal flaw in Reflektor, and why the dangerous word “pretentious” applies here, even though its stain can be difficult for any artist to remove. Using film or literary references is laudable, but calling such attention to them by using subtitles (in and of itself a bit pretentious) like “(Hey Orpheus)” and “(Oh Eurydice)” is too clever by half, and risks alienating listeners who don’t get the allusions and are now aware that they didn’t get them. Singer Régine Chassagne has always been one of the band’s biggest weaknesses – while she’s a talented musician and songwriter, her voice is thin and hollow – and having her sing in her native French on an album that is almost entirely in English seems pointless. It makes the lyrics less clear to the vast majority of listeners who don’t speak French, and the French lines are often shoehorned into the existing meter, like her “Jeanne d’Arc, oh” in the rollicking “Joan of Arc,” which I imagine will have a few non-Francophones wondering who “Jean Dachau” is. French is a beautiful language, but inserting it into an English song is almost automatically pretentious*, and it only detracts from Reflektor when Arcade Fire resorts to it.

* Never more true than in Electric Light Orchestra’s “Hold On Tight,” one of the worst songs ever recorded. Not only did they use French and overpronounce their guttural rhotics, but the French verse is just a bad translation of the English verse, so they were lazy as well.

The Suburbs was such a rousing success, even earning the most unlikely Album of the Year in Grammy history, that it raised expectations for Reflektor to a level that I concede may have been unfair. This would be a strong album for many artists, but given what Arcade Fire has shown itself capable of, Reflektor sounds like it’s caught between an ambition unachieved and a band that needed an editor but instead found an enabler. A good idea over four minutes may not play as well over six, and there are ideas on Reflektor that probably should have been cut entirely. The highlights here are among Arcade Fire’s best – the title track, “Normal Person,” “Joan of Arc,” and “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)” – but there’s too much filler around them, so much that the album never establishes a consistent pace or feel and it is reduced to a collection of singles that fall short of whatever lofty aspirations the band may have had for the record.

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When The Night, the debut album from South African-born musician Jean-Philip Grobler, who performs under the name St. Lucia, came across my desk in early October. Grobler’s music yearns back for the synth-pop heyday of the 1980s, an era before his birth, but marries it to tropical beats and rhythms and that avoid turning it into an anachronistic stumble down memory lane.

Grobler appears to bear no shame for his love of sunny, accessible pop music, and he has crafted a number of indelible hooks to express that affection for a style of music that, while current when I was a preteen, borders on the twee at this point. When the Night threatens to tumble off the cliff into saccharine nonsense at many points, but that incorporation of new backing lines, like the synthesized Caribbean pipes behind the single “Elevate,” means the songs are fresh if not exactly weighty. When St. Lucia turns up the guitars, as on the opener “The Night Comes Again,” or keeps the synths down in the mix so they don’t take over a track, like in the pulsating “All Eyes on You,” we’re at least getting something new even if the songs remain a little too sweet.

The album’s standout track, however, is “September,” where Grobler pushes out the walls around the rest of the album, creating layers of sound to produce an immersive and musically darker song that repeatedly runs you toward the edge of the crevasse before pulling you back to safety. Synth-heavy music like this always runs the risk of getting a little too “Jizz in My Pants,” but the varied percussion lines and the (presumably synthesized) horns give it just enough of a contemporary note to escape the Eurotrash bin. If Grobler can extend this darker ambient feel to the rest of his songs, even a poppier gem like “Elevate,” he’ll really be on to something.

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If you’re into extreme metal at all – and I can hardly blame you if you’re not – September saw the return of genre pioneers Carcass. Among the earliest practicioners of grindcore, once touring with grindcore founders Napalm Death along with Bolt Thrower and the awful American act Morbid Angel, Carcass evolved into the first true melodic death metal band, peaking with the greatest extreme metal album of all time, 1994’s Heartwork. Their new disc, Surgical Steel, their first since 1996, is close to a return to a form, remarkable for a band that’s been apart for so long, so while it doesn’t bring much new to the table, it’s a welcome addition to the Carcass canon and also shows how little the subgenre has advanced during their hiatus.

While singer Jeff Walker appears to shred his vocal cords on every track, Carcass’ music is intricate and very tightly rendered, a fusion of the classic sounds of Iron Maiden or Judas Priest with the increased speed of thrash and death metal acts like Slayer, Death, or Exodus. “Cadaver Pounch Conveyor System” has the album’s strongest riff, a dual-guitar line of incredible precision, followed by machine-gun riffing under the song’s bridge. You can actually understand most of the words, too, which is a good thing, as Walker hides extremely intelligent and literate musings behind mock-gory titles that allude to the band’s earlier albums, where their lyrics were in fact anatomically accurate descriptions of mutilation and evisceration. (It’s not the only allusion to early Carcass on the album; the cover art itself is a nod to their early EP Tools of the Trade, but cleaned up this time, just as the band seems to be.)

The slowed tempo on “A Congealed Clot of Blood” – itself a condemnation of jihadist terrorism – leads to a repetition of the chorus’ lyrics but over another rapid-fire guitar line, while “Granulating Dark Satanic Mills” is just a faster New Wave of British Heavy Metal track with growled vocals and a William Blake reference. Carcass do get a little silly at times, with the insanely fast “Captive Bolt Pistol” (Anton Chigurh’s weapon of choice), or the track “Noncompliance to ASTM F 899-12 Standard,” with a title referring to the international standard for the chemical requirements for stainless steel used in surgical instruments but lyrics that mock the prosy decline of the genre, which Walker derides as “dearth metal.”

The album even closes with an eight-minute mini-suite, “Mount of Execution,” almost all at normal speeds, relying on deep bass lines and staccato picking to create that sense of heaviness. This ain’t for everyone, but if you like modern melodeth acts like Children of Bodom, Wintersun, or Amon Amarth, it’s worth checking out.