Review: Arcade Fire's Experimental Doc 'The Reflektor Tapes' Hits A Flat Note

Well, it's not going to be easy to listen to another Arcade Fire album again. "You have to combine with a new force to make a new kind of wave," says the band's frontman Win Butler over a smorgasbord of superimposed images and concert footage. He says this at the beginning of his band's new rockumentary, and it ends up being one of the more comprehensible things in "The Reflektor Tapes." By 'new force,' he's referring to the musical traditions in Haiti, where the band spent a lot of time spiritually connecting with the locals for a new musical approach for their 2013 album Reflektor. 

After shooting some footage there, the band turned to the forceful Kahlil Joseph, the avant-garde music video director for the likes of Kendrick Lamar and FKA Twigs, for a collaboration on a new kind of concert film. The result? A painfully nonsensical piece of post-modernism (that's coming from someone who's had Reflektor on repeat since its release).

There's an...