Review: Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
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Suburbs are strange and disquieting places. They’re conceived as an intermediary stage between urban and rural life, where people can have yards and look at trees from their windows, but can also walk to their neighbors’ houses in just a few minutes. The product of this marriage between mutually exclusive lifestyle concepts is something completely different than its constituent parts. The only sound in the empty streets outside may be distant spring peepers and engines on far-away highways, but the electric streetlamps and porchlights won’t even allow the illusion of total darkness. There won’t be any poor people around,because they can’t afford the houses or meet the social standard of the neighborhood’s planners. And that means there won’t be many artists or freethinkers around, either. A conformist mentality can quickly take hold. This mentality – paranoid, xenophobic, and reflexively conservative – has come to define them in the popular imagination, and in the music of the Montreal band Arcade Fire.
Arcade Fire’s debut EP ended in a dreamy meditation on the phrase, “Let’s live in the suburbs.” Funeral, their widely acclaimed first album, is divided into halves, the first of which is largely made up of a suite of songs titled “Neighborhood #1-4.” Those songs describe the calcification of one generation and the struggle of its offspring to break free from their paranoid and stultifying community. Their second album, Neon Bible, depicts America as the neighborhood from Funeral writ large. But their third album, The Suburbs, is their first direct approach of the subject, and it may well be their last, because they explore it in great depth here. The result of that exploration is their third consecutive great album.
Album opener “The Suburbs” begins with a cymbal crash and an easygoing melody that vaguely resembles an that of an early-70s Neil Young song. It sounds, appropriately, like an ideal soundtrack to a backyard barbecue until the strings in the background take on an ominous cast and co-lead singer Regine Chassagne begins singing an eerie, wordless moan. The lyrics describe boredom and existential dread: “When all of the walls that they built in the 70s finally fall / And all of the houses they built in the 70s finally fall / It meant nothing, nothing at all.” Frontman Win Butler describes a desire to have a child, so that he can “show her some beauty before all this is done.” The passage of time clearly terrifies the speaker, who cries out, “In my dreams we’re still screamin’!”
Fear of waste and conformity pervades the entire album. “Ready to Start” charges in on the pounding drums and power chords of Arcade Fire anthems past, but its bright synthesizer pulses and industrial rhythms suitable to Depeche Mode or New Order don’t resemble the band’s previous work at all. Butler sings, “Well, the kids have always known / That the emperor wears no clothes / But they bow down to him anyway / It’s better than bein’ alone.” “Modern Man,” which sounds like an early Elvis Costello ballad, describes standing in line to take a number as the condition of contemporary society. The speaker in “Rococo,” which has the infinity-approaching sonic scope of Neon Bible’s “Intervention,” looks on a group teenagers who ritualistically repeat a word that they don’t understand and curses them.
Throughout the album, the image of empty spaces recurs frequently. On the hard-charging, “Wake Up”-rivaling anthem “Empty Room,” Chassagne’s voice is as powerful and as haunting as it has ever been as she describes realizing that she loves someone while sitting alone in an empty room. This image is paralleled on the following track, “City with No Children,” as Butler sings, “I hide inside of my private prison.” In “Half Life I,” which sounds like something Julee Cruise should be singing in a David Lynch movie, Win sings, “You say you hear human voices, but they’re only echoes.” The album’s centerpiece, “Half Life II,” which sounds like an angry M83, includes the lyrics “In this home, it has no life,” and “One day, they will see that it’s long gone.”
These descriptions of emptiness are paralleled with the image of the suburban sprawl, which is ostensibly intended to fill the void with community and economic opportunity, but instead only compounds the feeling of alienation. In the first of the two climactic songs called “The Sprawl,” Win sings, “Let’s take a drive through the sprawl / Through the towns that they built to change.” In the magnificent synthesizer anthem “The Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” Regine sings, “Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains /And there’s no end in sight.” It seems that the only thing to do in the sprawl is to drive aimlessly. Song after song describes wandering the highways, silently imagining going someplace far away. In “Suburban War,” Win sings to a lost friend, “I searched for you in every passing car.” In the mournful, gospel-tinged “Wasted Hours,” the narrator says, “We’re still driving around and around and around,” and describes himself as a “kid in [a bus], longing to be free.”
But he clearly doesn’t see himself remaining a kid much longer. Those “dead shopping malls” are the sprawl condensed into a single image, and the prospect of physical and spiritual moribundity haunts the speakers. The propulsive, Springsteen-like rock song “Month of May” describes a “violet wind” that “blew the [telephone] wires away.” At the end of the song, Win shouts, “Let the wind take my body away” in a voice shot through with mad mortal terror. In “Deep Blue,” the chess match between Gary Kasparov and the supercomputer of the title touches off a meditation on technological waste. Win sings, “We watched the end of the century compressed on a tiny screen / A dead star collapsing.” “We Used to Wait” further describes the speaker’s anxiety of technological change. He bitterly groans, “I used to write letters; I used to sign my name,” and mourns “All those wasted lives in the wilderness downtown.”
But the album, while mournful, does suggest a kind of limited triumph over the compromised culture of the suburbs. In “The Sprawl II,” Regine sings of standing against the conformist spirit of her community: “They heard me singing and they told me to stop / Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock / I wonder if the world’s so small / Can we ever get away from the sprawl?” The existence of the song implies that the speaker did. But though “The Sprawl” suggests the speakers have finally left the suburbs, the album’s solemn coda “The Suburbs (Continued)” shows that the speaker is still fixated on the past, still looking for some place to call home.
Is that where the album leaves Arcade Fire? The Suburbs is as cohesive and as powerful as any album in recent memory. Its lyrics are rich with well-observed detail, and its music is as compelling as this band’s work has come to be expected to be. But now that the suburbs are finally behind them, where will the greatest band of this generation go? We can only hope that, wherever it is, they get there quickly.
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About the Author
Jeremiah McNeil is a 27-year-old former cat wrangler for the Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey Circus, though they presently disavow any information relating to his time in their service. When he was 24, a lion tamer informed him that amid the gibberish he scrawled in his scat on bathroom stall walls were passages of recognizable English. Since then, Jeremiah has been driven by ambition and Adderall to be the best writer he can be. Please humor him. Follow Jeremiah on Twitter. Email this Author | All posts by Jeremiah
here’s a review of the album that explains it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-fAQcx2jzk
it’s exactly how arcade fire approach their music!