Review: Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (IV)

August 1st, 2010 by Oswald Hobbes / Comment on this post

Man, I’ve listened to this record maybe twenty times and I just don’t think I “get” it. Yes – it’s great. Arcade Fire have released their third consecutive masterpiece, and I join every other right-thinking person on the planet in being elated about this fact. And it sounds fantastic – the production mistakes of Neon Bible have been corrected, and the record pops out of your stereo in a way that even Funeral didn’t. The bass is especially prominent, turning some of the slower, waltzy numbers into low-key new wave bangers. The Suburbs is close to the ground; it hums and thrums.

But some of the elements don’t add up for me. The lyrics are intelligent and thoughtful, but I don’t see any grand statement cohering. The lyrics on Funeral were impressionistic, deeply felt, colorful, humorous – that album truly felt like a call to arms for all the kids stuck in the suburbs, feeling their feelings without any way to appropriately express them. And Neon Bible was a claustrophobic nightmare, with the band always one step ahead of the great yawning maw of an inevitable apocalypse. But I don’t hear anything on that level here; yeah, the suburbs are boring, and if you want to be an artist you should probably move to a big city. And indie kids don’t dance at rock shows. So what?

The old-fashioned car on the cover made me think this record would examine the well-manicured suburbs and plentiful cocktails of John Updike’s short stories from the 70s, a kind of period piece. And that’s the vibe you get from about half the songs – they’re elegiac, with subtle melodies that reveal themselves slowly. (There’s a lot of repetition on hand here, unfortunately supporting most people’s ideas about some kind of conceptualism at work. I say “unfortunately” because I don’t think the record itself can support that kind of intense focus – if the main concept is what I think it is, then they didn’t do enough with it to justify spending over sixty minutes on the subject.) But even early on, Butler starts whining about the “businessmen drinking [his] blood,” which makes me believe that he’s writing from his own unique perspective. And since Butler was born in 1980, he had the same Goonies childhood all the rest of us did, and it wasn’t that stifling.

Look, this isn’t a bad record. As I said earlier, it’s pretty great. I will keep listening to it until I wring some satisfactory meaning from it. But the band did themselves a disservice by calling the damn thing The Suburbs and being so serious about the whole thing. It’s true that Arcade Fire make all of their contemporaries look disposable and tacky, and they’re one of the only bands that can convincingly claim U2 / Radiohead stature. (Their career is starting to look exactly like U2’s, actually, with all of the awkward transitional records removed from the equation – I’ll call The Suburbs their Joshua Tree without feeling weird about it. [The Suburbs is Arcade Fire’s Joshua Tree.]) But the suburbs? Really? Maybe it’s because I never made my great escape to a major metropolitan area, but it’s not that bad out here. I mean, we’re still people. We’re not dead inside. We, too, listen to Arcade Fire.