I love this record.
It's playful, soulful, and warm. The country/blues influences really ground the album. The record is a call to youth to search for genuine meaning. It rejects "filling" our homes and our minds, in favour of filling our hearts (Everything Now) and then argues that only this will enable people to avoid dependence on creature comforts. It illustrates the strength of youthful innocence (Peter Pan), satirizes the crassly superficial nature of consumption (Infinite Content), and asserts the timeless value of devotion (Good God Damn) and personal relationships (Put Your Money On Me).
This is a confident record that looks at the world and sees a lot worth celebrating. It's a far cry from the cold, cynical politics of Reflektor, an album that felt joyless by its own right. Everything Now feels like the same band that wrote Funeral, except older, less neurotic, more open-minded about the lighter side of life, and concerned that youth today are getting lost in the aimlessness of consumer culture, media, and politics. This isn't an album that decries the world as vapid or meaningless; to the contrary, this is a record that says wake up and start focusing on what genuinely matters in life before it's too late.
This is a good album. Had a very enjoyable couple of listens through so far. It feels a lot more focused than Reflektor, with only Infinite Content being a real meh moment.
Infinitely Content is a tough track to enjoy. I'm pretty sure it's satire. And I think it's meant to juxtapose a crass version of what it means to be "infinitely content" (content defined as happy with one's life) with a second version of what it means to be infinitely content. Both kinds of contentment are possibilities. The former represents the crass superficiality that most people are stuck with, which is unsatisfactory. This crass version results from filling one's mind and one's room, to the exclusion of one's heart. The second represents a deeper contentment that can only be earned through focusing on devotion, love, and relationships (Peter Pan, Put Your Money On Me) and by consciously abandoning the American Dream ("it leaves you baby, if you let it leave"). I might be wrong.