Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs

This is the band you will listen to. Photos: Wikimedia + Salvation Army

In the suburbs, I, I learned to drive/And you told me I’d never survive/Grab your mother’s keys, we’re leaving…

We were already, already bored.

In 2010, Arcade Fire find themselves in the baroque mansion that is their wild success, trying to live amongst the gilded acclamations and overwrought praise justifiably laid as a foundation after 2004’s epic Funeral.  The follow-up, Neon Bible, circumvented the inevitable expectations by turning yet more inward with a dark and introspective bent. And now the band has taken another turn, as their new release The Suburbs is an expansive record, full of open space.  Far from being extroverted, however, this space–the neatly ordered streets dividing suburban homes, the asphalt between the car-confined suburbanites– breeds alienation, and The Suburbs feels like a lament.

The emptiness of stereotypical suburban life pervades The Suburbs as an aesthetic.  Although the Montreal based septet maintains the cinematic feel of their previous work, their third full album is humbler. In place of the explosive catharsis and frenetic despair of their previous work, there is steadiness.  Some may ascribe this to the band maturing, but it’s more ennui, as if they could not bother to care about trying to match their previous output.  Although The Suburbs remains a compelling, well-crafted album of indie rock, it is also content to be quotidian.  This is the everyday music of The Woodlands, the Houston ‘planned community’ where the Butler brothers grew up, and of the countless Lake Forest drives or Meadow Glen roads that pervade America, and The Suburbs is weaker for it; a very, very good album, but not a great one.

(Photo courtesy of americansongwriter.com)

If you’ve listened to Funeral or Neon Bible, you are well acquainted with the musical components that the Arcade Fire works with here.  But, if you haven’t, then you’re getting strummed guitars, with pianos and strings and the occasional synthesizer flourish.  In general, however, the instrumentation on The Suburbs is more restrained than the Arcade Fire’s earlier work, with fewer exuberant interludes or frenetic layering of melody upon melody.  In the steady guitar strums and ethereal synths you can hear lead vocalist and songwriter Win Butler’s pre-release proclamation that The Suburbs would sound like Depeche Mode and Neil Young, but this direction doesn’t necessarily help the band.

It’s not that The Suburbs is by any means unpleasant to listen to, but there are few of those swelling, exuberant moments of manic energy, overflowing rhythm and melody that so typified the band’s best work up to  this point.  The album peaks early with “Rococo,” a sardonic take-down of the ‘cool kids’ that populate high schools and shopping malls across this great land.  There is resentment in Butler’s voice when he sings “They build it up/just to burn it back down,” and “They want to own you/but they don’t know what game they’re playing,” and this exemplifies the dilemma faced by the Arcade Fire–how does one write an album of alienation and loneliness when you are simultaneously being feted as the champion of a genre?

In “Rococo,” at least, Butler answers with an outpouring of emotion, bitter and triumphant. Here the Neil Youngism reaches its full potential as a sparse arrangement of acoustic guitar and sing-song lyrics builds and builds until it bursts, with a biting lead guitar line rising out of a sea of strings and Régine Chassagne’s ethereal vocals, lifting you with it towards a rapturous state of release.  Butler’s answer to the naysayers, critics, and bandwagon fans is to rise above them all.

It is unfortunate that the rest of The Suburbs fails to reach those same passionate heights, because the potential is surely there, but the execution is lacking.  Certainly the rest of the album is littered with good, listenable tracks.  The haunting chorus of “The Suburbs,” the Joy Division-lite rock of “Ready to Start,” the driving percussion of “Empty Room,” these are all nice moments.  But for whatever reason, perhaps resentment at following a studio mandated tour-album-tour schedule, or fatigue from fighting the expectations of an adoring public, The Suburbs can’t sustain these bright moments throughout.  Too much of the album simply passes you by, in a steady but unexceptional march of the various aforementioned musical components, variously arranged and rearranged.  It’s far too easy to put this album on and read a book, or wash the dishes, or drive through town, and have it end abruptly, to your great surprise, as you had not even really noticed its passing.

The Arcade Fire may have set out to make the a soundtrack for hometown ennui and disaffection, and by that standard The Suburbs succeeds.  It is certainly an enjoyable listen, but for the next one, they would be better served to get out of town, as with previous albums and aim once more for the rarefied air they can reach when they push themselves.

Arcade Fire- Rococo (download)

Arcade Fire- The Suburbs (download)

Arcade Fire- Ready to Start (download)

-Dan