The Arcade Fire, The Suburbs
Reviewed by: Christian Hagen
Few bands have started their career with as respected and widely acclaimed an album as The Arcade Fire did with Funeral in 2004. It remains an almost insurmountable classic, coming at exactly the right time for its lushly realized mix of vibrant, youthful energy and its grand themes of life and death. Perhaps it was this classic quality that made Funeral’s follow-up, 2007’s Neon Bible, one of the most hotly debated albums of the last decade amongst critics and fans alike. Many fell into polarized camps regarding that release, some saying it was nearly as important and beautiful as the band’s debut, others calling it a failure. The divisions stemmed in many ways from the group taking a darker, less uplifting turn both lyrically and musically, with fewer anthems and more burning ballads.
Musically, The Arcade Fire’s albums have taken a very lifelike path. Funeral, despite its grim title and its examination of death, feels much more about childhood than about the end of one’s life. Throughout the album, Win Butler sings of children forgetting their names without their parents around, running in the streets when the lights go out, waking up, and playing underneath the covers. The video for “Rebellion (Lies)” shows the band marching through the streets performing for kids as they dance and play behind them. And like a child, the music is full of almost giddy energy, hope, possibility, as though the future before them was open to all the perfection of their dreams. Even the saddest songs on Funeral contain powerful uplift; there seem to be no moments of pessimism on the entire disc.
If Funeral is a childhood anthem, Neon Bible is the same child reaching the pain and angst of the teenage years. From an increasing political awareness (“Black Mirror”) to the desire to break out of a father’s house (“Windowsill”) and even the teenage need to hide in a world of the young, a place no one unwanted can penetrate (“No Cars Go”), Neon Bible finds The Arcade Fire in a moodier mindset, one of fear and isolation, that feeling that hope is distant and every fight is within the grand arena. From this standpoint, the band’s musical shift makes sense; even the happiest children must grow up some time, and face the realities of an imperfect world.
Logically, then, it would follow that the band’s third album would be that next step in a person’s life, the world of adulthood, of responsibility and work and a growing sense of mortality, but also an understanding of how the world works and how you can change it for the better. And so it is with The Suburbs.
The opening title track begins with a Springsteen-esque Jersey stomp, a beating heart of guitar, bass, and drums, in which all the other pieces of the band become incidental to the classic rock showcase in the front. The lyrics are of reminiscence: “In the suburbs, I/Learned to drive/And they told me, ‘You’ll never survive.’” What the words lack in subtlety, they make up for in honesty; the song is laden with the pain of memory. The chorus rings with an almost tragic wistfulness for the days when even the little things were emotionally meaningful: “Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m moving past the feeling.”
The Suburbs may be the most lyrically and thematically consistent collection of songs of the band’s repertoire. Butler’s words transition from track to track like a long train of mostly unbroken, evolving thoughts. “The Suburbs” looks at the past with fondness, “Ready to Start” releases the past and looks forward. “Modern Man” finds the singer becoming acclimated to life in a time of worry. Each song picks up where the previous one left off in terms of ideas, and as Butler’s understanding of his surroundings grows, so grow the stakes of his subjective discourse, from personal to communal to national, as the climax of the album, the two-part “Sprawl,” crawls into reclusive contemplation under the weight of an ever-expanding urban environment that’s outside control and then bursts into action, shouting down the man-made mountains of commerce and greed and rebelling against the fear and loneliness of suburban life.
However, even as the album features striking lyrical and thematic consistency, musically it is probably the collective’s weakest effort to date. “The Suburbs” is rollicking if a tad repetitive, and “Ready to Start” features a gradual but passionate burn that propels it with a sense of inevitability and purpose. But “Modern Man” slows that momentum to a contented crawl, and “Rococo,” though the appearance of spiraling strings and a building tension throughout keep it interesting, is relatively forgettable. Perhaps if this really is The Arcade Fire’s treatise on adulthood in modern America (or Canada, as is likely), they’ve decided to make music like modern adults: Calm and mostly unchallenging, preferring to go with the flow and rarely raise a voice in anger or even joy. Gone is the sea of voices screaming at the listener to wake up. Nowhere is anyone asking, “Tell me lord, am I an antichrist?” Win Butler prefers to keep his voice at a breathy softness barely above speaking in terms of volume and only intermittently above speaking in terms of pitch.
Some songs still hum with the power of the first two records, though rarely does any song reach transcendence. In fact, on first listen, many listeners will probably find themselves downright bored. I found myself lolling almost to sleep the first time I reached the stretch from “Wasted Hours” to “We Used To Wait,” a three song set that, along with “Deep Blue,” feels neither necessary nor especially worthwhile. With a running time of over an hour, there’s certainly room for a cut or two, and these songs, while each contain moments of interest, lack the punch or uniqueness of the rest of the band’s discography, or even the rest of the album.
However, upon repeated listens of The Suburbs, something extraordinary happens. On the second listen, musical context begins to reveal itself as songs begin to fit together like puzzle pieces. On the third, close listening reveals surprising beauty and attention to detail. The drums on “City With No Children” pop with a force that elevates the entire recording. The build of “Half Light I” creates a touching feeling of release, of elegance, affectingly so. With each new listen, moments of brilliance seem to appear as if from nothing, and what was a disappointment begins to gradually approach triumph.
The finest tracks of the entire production come in the aforementioned “Sprawl” two-parter. The first, subtitled “Flatland” is a hauntingly intimate acoustic performance, as Butler’s nearly broken voice laments the search for meaning in a world of soulless commercialism. “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” is the album’s shining moment, a pulsing disco beat carrying a stirring vocal performance by Butler’s wife Régine Chassagne, whose work on The Suburbs is, maybe for the first time, a true highlight amidst a band of such size and instrumental variety. It’s a refreshing and surprisingly emotional song that is as terrific from first listen as any of the band’s previous work.
Ultimately, like a rebellious former youth wandering through adulthood and trying to find his place, The Suburbs needs time and patience, and it’s very likely that many listeners will give it neither. It’s understandable; when your first album was among the finest albums of the last decade, anything you release afterwards will be held to the same standard from the beginning. The trouble is, with The Suburbs, The Arcade Fire seem to be exploring nuance, and songs that seem very much straightforward and almost dull on initial listens are revealed to be hiding treasures beneath the classic rock veneer. Admittedly it may be their weakest album to date, but after peeling through fifth, sixth, seventh listens and finding new songs that interest me every time, I’m fully willing to give this album time to grow into maturity. Maybe, after a while, I’ll find that it was fully grown all along.
Rating: 80%