It's a world from which Arcade Fire have opted out. Most members of the band decline to be interviewed at all. Frontman Win Butler acquiesces only occasionally, and when he does, the results lead you to fear he may be waging a lonely war against media intrusion that involves trying to bore the world's journalists to death, one by one.
One section of their website is tantalizingly titled Personal Secrets. Click on it, and you discover that one member has posted, without explanation, three blurred pictures of himself trying out various sit-on lawnmowers. If anything, Arcade Fire's second album seems even more shrouded in mystery than their debut, 2004's 500,000-selling Funeral.
Then, Butler sketched in a few autobiographical details to clarify its interest in power cuts, ice storms and Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier; this time, he's been less forthcoming. But if specifics are thin on the ground, you hardly need anyone to point out its overall preoccupation. The first intimation of coming Armageddon arrives fewer than 90 seconds in and Neon Bible is still waving its End is Nigh placard as it draws to a close.
Every song is replete with dread, nameless or otherwise: you're never far away from a rising tide or a grim prognosis or persons unknown kicking in your door in the dead of night. The sources of the apocalyptic disquiet are diverse - Windowsill manages to finger both "a holy war", and, more originally, MTV - but the end result never varies: "a time is coming - all words will lose their meaning", "not much chance of survival", "nothing lasts forever". Nor does there seem much chance of the end of days being enlivened by the reappearance of a Messiah.
The Christian figures on the album are subject to mockery. Building Downtown (Antichrist Television Blues) scornfully depicts a God-fearing father who seems to believe he can escape the horrors of the post-9/11 world by pushing his teenage daughter into showbusiness. Intervention is musically breathtaking - it opens with a pipe organ playing a portentous fanfare that quickly resolves into a sort of garage-rock riff, then gradually builds into an utterly glorious climax - but it's fuelled by withering disgust at anyone claiming God is on their side.
Intervention is perhaps the prime example of Neon Bible's masterstroke, which is to set all this doom-mongering to joyously uplifting music. There are soaring string arrangements, beautiful backing vocal harmonies, harps and French horns, great welling choruses and, perhaps more surprisingly, thwacking, propulsive rhythms. It's hard to think of another album that rocks in such an epic manner without sounding completely ridiculous.
The effect is of a kind of triumphant gloom. The music implies you should be throwing a party at exactly the same time as the lyrics suggest you should be hiding under the table with your jumper pulled over your head. Throughout, it's difficult to work out what the Arcade Fire might have been listening to: a rare and satisfying sensation in 2007, when virtually everything sounds a bit like something else.
The album's originality carries you through the odd moment when ambition outstrips ability, not least the closing My Body is a Cage, which rather overdoes the church organ in service of a lyric that sails perilously close to the perennially disheartening topic of how terrible it is being in a successful rock band. But that's a rare misstep on an otherwise remarkable piece of work that at times seems magical. An album this mired in fathomless darkness shouldn't sound so dazzling, but it does.
Like the band who made it, Neon Bible is a thrilling enigma.
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