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The band’s latest album, Everything Now, proves that Butler’s still a man with a message.

On Everything Now, the musically mercurial band offers rescue from our shabbier impulses: deliverance from a world that's materially obsessed and spiritually dead, Brad Wheeler writes

Somethin’ filled up, my heart with nothin’
Someone told me not to cry.

Now that I'm older, my heart's colder, And I can see that it's a lie.

With their debut album Funeral in 2004, Win Butler and Arcade Fire told us to wake up, that our hearts were meant to bleed. A dozen years later, with the release of their fifth album, Everything Now, they're still at it, exposing lies and telling big truths, brooding in the basement and hollering from the rooftops – with a zeal some might call messianic.

That may seem a surprising word for a band that, these days, often seems determined to get us out on the dance floor, but religious themes thread the canon of Arcade Fire and its front-man lyricist, a Mormon-raised American who earned a degree in religious studies at Montreal's McGill University.

The band's latest album proves that Butler's still a man with a message. On the song Electric Blue, off Everything Now, Butler's wife and bandmate, Régine Chassagne, may be the one handling the vocals, but she acknowledges him as the one standing at the pulpit. "Jesus Christ, what could I do," she sings, frustrated and confused. "I don't know how to sing your blues."

That JC reference could be a throwaway expletive, a sign of her growing frustration. But this is Win Butler she's talking about. It's more likely that those two words are acknowledging what critics and fans have seen him as for years: He's a rock 'n' roll saviour yearning to save the souls of his listeners.

Butler is a message-caster, a sermonizer, a fearless pedant and a broad-shouldered, bad-haircut polarizer who sells heavy euphoria by the song.

Butler's not a messiah in the biblical rise-from-the-dead sense. But he offers rescue from our shabbier impulses: A rock 'n' roll deliverance from a world that's materially obsessed and spiritually dead. Consider the song Infinite Content from the new album, which comes in two forms (a racing Bowie-esque rocker, followed by a loping acoustic wink to Wilco) and with a play on words: infinite content/ infinitely content. It's about unstopping consumerism, insatiable needs and limitless supplies. Butler may want us to dance, but he's determined to help us connect with our humanity too – and maybe even our souls.

God knows rock 'n' roll needs a saviour . "[Hip hop] has been extremely relevant over the last 10 years and rock music is just not any more," Butler said recently. "A tear rolls down my cheek as I say that."

Trust Butler to make rock relevant again. He's a message-caster, a sermonizer, a fearless pedant and a broad-shouldered, bad-haircut polarizer who sells heavy euphoria by the song.

But before we give Butler his due, let's pause for a moment to acknowledge the rock 'n' roll messiahs who've come before him.

They made their first appearances decades ago, right around the time when Patti Smith and her then-lover Sam Shepard released the one-act play Cowboy Mouth, about would-be rock stars searching for a new religion.

"The old God is just too far away," declared Smith's character, Cavale. "Any great … rock 'n' roll song can raise me higher than all of Revelations."

That was 1971, the same year Jesus Christ Superstar made its debut on Broadway and the same year John Lennon asked the world to imagine there was "no religion too." In the decade or so that followed, rock music flourished and expanded its reach, reason and possibilities.

There was Lennon, the dreamer, and Smith, the mystic poet. Bob Marley was the One Love. U2's Bono, the grandstander, came later. Bono sings about "trying to throw your arms around the world," which is what rock messiahs attempt to do.

Rock ’n’ roll messiahs like Bono, John Lennon and Kanye West paved the way for Butler, expanding rock music's reach, passion and possibilites. Ming Wong/The Globe and Mail

They galvanize and mesmerize. They have megaphone outlooks, anthemically delivered romantic ideas, diehard pretension. Let's not forget Kanye, who in 2013 gave us the boldly enigmatic and aptly named Yeezus.

But as the rock messiahs raise bars, they raise ire, too, offending us with their unbearable audacity. (Would we prefer bland kingdoms led by Ed Sheerans and Taylor Swifts instead? God – and the rock messiahs – help us.)

Butler has come in for his fair share of criticism and fan backlash. He and his band have been accused of being self-aggrandizing and overly didactic since Arcade Fire's inception.

The world took notice early on. In April, 2005, the Canadian edition of Time magazine proclaimed Arcade Fire as Canada's most intriguing rock band, noting that critics the world over were uniformly in love with the country's "hottest musical export." (The "musical" qualifier being a necessary appeasement to the softwood-lumber crowd.)

Nearly a decade later, in 2014, Rolling Stone magazine upped the stakes by posing the burning rhetorical question, Can Arcade Fire Be The World's Biggest Band? Indeed, the Montreal-based ensemble has come a long way.

Arcade Fire is still coming, and the pressure may be getting to Butler, often criticized in the past for his prickly perfectionism. "Trumpets of angels, call for my head," he sings on Put Your Money on Me, a low-riding Blondie-style pop-rock delight off Everything Now. "But I fight through the ether, and I'll quit when I'm dead."

Backlash is the nearly inescapable flip side of success when it comes to a band such as Arcade Fire, which left its small American independent label Merge Records after 2010's The Suburbs. That record, the band's third, won a Grammy and a Juno for the year's top album, as well as a BRIT Award for best international LP.

The 2013 follow-up Reflektor, inspired by a visit to an earthquake-ravaged Haiti, was released on major label Universal. For Everything Now, the band has jumped to another major, Columbia.

For the Reflektor tour, Butler controversially suggested those attending the concerts should don costumes or dress in formal attire for the occasion – a sign, to some, that the front man was taking his music and its message a little too seriously. The presumptuousness caused outrage among fans and music writers, but Arcade Fire's management learned no lessons.

Butler and his band have been accused of being self-aggrandizing and overly didactic since their inception. Guy Aroch

Ticket holders for the band's intimate Everything Now album launch this week at Brooklyn's Grand Prospect Hall were asked via e-mail to refrain from wearing "shorts, large logos, flip-flops, tank tops, crop tops, baseball hats, solid white or red clothing."

The flip-flop ban is just good sense, but the band's overbearing messaging is becoming too much for some. "There is no more embarrassing band on the planet, in terms of music and their whole thing," one tweet read. Another tweeted, "having a dress code at their shows is the least insufferable thing Arcade Fire has ever done."

(The band's social-media manager later took responsibility for the e-mail and issued a sorry-not-sorry apology. "Sue me for wanting something nice," Tannis Wright said in a statement.)

As Arcade Fire's undisputed leader, derisive scrutiny is Butler's cross to bear. The rock messiahs who came before him have felt his pain. "Christ, the way things are going," John Lennon sang on The Ballad of John and Yoko, "they're going to crucify me."

But they find ways to abide. Just ask Bono. Although his appeal has waxed and waned over U2's massively successful career, the singer with the shaded lenses has shown a remarkable ability to weather any storms of approval to come out as annoying – and sermonizing – as ever.

The sermons and spiritual questioning from Butler continue with Everything Now, produced by the band and Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter and Pulp's Steve Mackey. "Love is hard, sex is easy," Butler sings on the Signs of Life, a bubbling, bass-driven cut that could raise dead Bee Gees. "God in heaven, could you please me?"

The issue of suicide is raised on Good God Damn, a slow slice of seventies blue-eyed funk. "You wanna say goodbye, to your oldest friends … maybe there's a good God, damn."

Butler’s sermons and spiritual questioning continue with Everything Now, produced by the band and Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Pulp’s Steve Mackey.

And Peter Pan delivers something of an homage to Bruce Springsteen, a generational hero who electrified a wandering, disillusioned herd. Born to Run references a girl named Wendy and a runaway American dream. On Peter Pan, Butler sings, "Be my Wendy," while noting a "dead-eyed American dream."

Although the album's title-tune first single is musically buoyant, with a sampled flute and an Abba-esque swirl, the song's anti-Internet message is not of the Dancing Queen kind.

"I don't think anyone knew when we were signing up for Gmail accounts, that we'd be getting direct marketing of things we write in our private e-mails," Butler recently told Dutch website 3voor12. "It turns out it was kind of hijacking all of human content and turning it into money."

The reception of the album Everything Now is bound to be mixed, as often is the case with artists who aim high and look to switch up their sound from record to record.

"Every record we put out, there's been some people who have been like, 'Oh no, they've lost it, they suck now,'" Butler said in the 3voor12 interview. "I kind of knew early on that those people were not correct."

Butler demands much from his band and much of his fans. Some of the latter will fall by the wayside. That can't be helped. Rock messiahs look at the bigger picture, fight through the ether and only quit when they're dead.