The Arcade Fire has no shame, and that’s weird: Shame separates most “good” indie music from the mainstream. Most bands in The Arcade Fire’s class keep themselves from being too emotionally obvious – whiny, bombastic, cliché, narcissistic – and look for ways to communicate meaning without slapping you in the face with it.

But The Arcade Fire don’t hesitate to get their message out using violent force, if necessary. Their weapons: movie-script lyrics, movie-score strings, heart-thumping rhythms, and on their new album Neon Bible, a heart-wrenching church organ. They’re not the only band to use these tools. But they’re one of the few good bands to use them how they’re supposed to be used: as evokers, rather than communicators (or obscurers), of emotion.

That’s why it’s sometimes hard for me to trust The Arcade Fire. The combination of Win Butler’s quavering croons about the end of the world and the eight-person band’s cinematic crescendos can get hard to stomach for an listener who craves music that’s Kid A-level obtuse. So when The Arcade Fire make a misstep, you can literally feel the disconnect between what the band intended to convey and what they actually conveyed to you. It’s the same feeling you might get listening to a bad Nickelback song (redundant description, I know): You know exactly what the song’s about, but you’re more than “not feeling it.” You’re annoyed they even tried.

Luckily, The Arcade Fire rarely screw up on Neon Bible. Their debut, Funeral, deftly captured the moment when grief blossoms into hope, when realizing that you’re mortal liberates instead of terrifies. Neon Bible aims for a baser emotional spectrum by focusing on paranoia, doubt and claustrophobia, and occasionally the release from those feelings. It’s a more somber album, with fewer moments of guitar-drums-violin-piano-horns-glockenspiel ecstasy. But that doesn’t mean the album is lifeless. Its musical arrangements are more fascinating in their restraint: not the artistic restraint of a self-conscious band, but rather the emotional restraint required to stay sane in a sick world.

Opener “Black Mirror” is almost, well, a black-mirror reflection of “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” the song that began Funeral. Both slowly gain steam as they progress, propelled by piano, Butler starting hushed and ending foaming at the mouth. “Neighborhoods #1” upped the ante with disco beats, ascending melodies and a final chorus of ecstatic “woohoo”-ing. But “Black Mirror” seethes like a bubbling cauldron, all whooshing bass line and percussion that sounds like an ominous door knock. It climaxes with a legion of strings that spiral around Butler’s horrified refrain “black mirror, black mirror.” “Neighborhoods #1” was about escaping isolation through personal bonds; “Black Mirror” is about staring at your surroundings and being worried about what you see. It makes sense that “Black Mirror” is less fun to listen to, but as a piece of art it’s as convincing as anything The Arcade Fire have done.

Not all the songs on Neon Bible are so claustrophobic though. As they did on Funeral, The Arcade Fire mine the rhythms of decades past to make their songs more impacting and spacious. Rockabilly, mo-town, samba and more lay submerged in many of the tracks, but they’re not there just as tokens to sonic diversity. In “Keep the Car Running,” Butler talks about nightmares and a frenzied readiness for escape, but a catchy new-wave beat, buzzing guitar bounce and hand claps make his franticness both palpable and palatable. “Antichrist Television Blues,” is a paranoid pop-protest masterpiece, evoking Dylan with its name, Springsteen with its driving, rambling scope and Yorke with its anxious post-9/11, anti-everything lyrics.

Real, ecstatic catharsis of the type found all over Funeral doesn’t show up on Neon Bible until its penultimate track, “No Cars Go.” It’s the same sort of song as Sufjan Steven’s “Chicago”: instantly likeable, unbelievably epic, lush, forceful and simple, anchoring the album it’s on while also feeling removed from it. It’s also the only time on Neon Bible that Butler and Regine Chassagne (his wife and sometimes-fellow-vocalist) loosen up with their lyrics, taking a simple line — “I know a place where no cars go” — and making permutations that involve spaceships and submarines. If The Arcade Fire blow up in the mainstream (maybe they have: Their three upcoming shows at the Chicago Theater sold out in seconds), this will be the anthem that does it.

There are moments on the album that simply don’t work though. The downtrodden mantra of the title track draws too much attention to Butler’s melodrama without proper musical accompaniment. “Intervention” is a decent song, but its massive Phantom of the Opera organ make the lyrics plod rather than soar. And even more so than on Funeral, the production on Neon Bible is muddy and uneven. Chassagne’s vocals often sound recorded in a tin can.

But my complaints won’t hold true for everyone, since The Arcade Fire’s ambitious, evocative style affects people in different ways. Music is an emotional, instinctual process for the band, not an intellectual exercise. Different songs will hit people in different ways: Some will connect perfectly while others will miss and come off as pretentious. But The Arcade Fire’s talent is that they usually succeed at affecting without pandering. They want to change your life, and they’re not secretive about it. No shame in honesty.