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i found this review amusing. although, i must agree that "my body is a cage" is my favorite song on the album thus far.

Review by Mike Powell, eMusic

Hotly anticipated second album from Canadas biggest indie export.

Less than two minutes into Intervention, the band's leader Win Butler crumples under the line every spark of friendship and love will die without a home. By this time, soldiers and church and crying have already been covered. Its a demonstration of suckerpunching. But this is the Arcade Fires shtick: fifty ticker-tape parades and six screens playing Miracle On 34th Street simultaneously, soundtracked by Livin On a Prayer. Underdog gumption sells, and in indie rock, former playground for huge egos skulking under cultivated self-effacement, so does bare-assed emotional optimism.

Initial rapture over the Arcade Fire spoke to a broad wanting in indie-music listeners: less wit, more feeling. Though where new romanticism toyed with being arch, Neon Bibles n-new romanticism gloriously retarded metaphysics like my body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love, ten-ton pipe organs is almost indigestibly earnest. Then again, thats the point: the feelings are bigger than horse pills, the gravitas heavier than whale testicles.

Neon Bible isnt nearly as immediate or consistent as Funeral. It has the same Bowie anthems and New Order stride, but the brisk hope has turned stone dead. The tunes are simpler, the lyrics are dumber, and the sentiments are wielded like clubs. But this is what anthems are made of the best of Neon Bible is irresistible. When Win unleashes the title of Black Mirror through a curtain of swirling strings and backwards whispers, its practically kitsch. But, of course, its not funny. Not at all. I want to squeeze my fists and take him very seriously. At albums end you realize that My Body Is a Cage, a swollen, blankly hopeless slave dirge complete with bloodied, maudlin wailing and an unresolved climax, is the centerpiece. And even though The Well and the Lighthouse practically pulls a muscle trying to ape Springsteens heroism (which he nipped from Phil Spector anyhow), the lyrics are about dying, splashing around in the dark, being lost and cod-Biblical yearning Resurrected, living in a lighthouse, if you leave them, ships are gonna wreck. The Arcade Fire, who once sounded like a guiding force or a way out, are now playing as theater kids with a teenagers sense of apocalypse as trapped and lost as any other mook in this frigid downer of a world.