Released August 2, 2010
9 / 10
Favorites
The Suburbs, Ready To Start, Rococo, Half Light II (No Celebration), Suburban War, Month Of May, Deep Blue, The Suburbs (continued)
Least favorites
City With No Children
I turn to lead singer Win Butler for his take on the function of this concept album that won the band the coveted Album of the Year Grammy in 2011: " ['The Suburbs' is] neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbs - it's a letter from the suburbs." Arcade Fire's third studio album rallies art rock and baroque pop flavors, influences from Depeche Mode and Neil Young and Win and William Butler's upbringing in the suburbs of Houston to deliver a direct and truthful album; unadorned yet carefully thought-out; creating and populating new spaces with the help of Markus Dravs on the production side (who has most notoriously worked with Coldplay, Björk, Florence + the Machine and Kings of Leon). Most of the album is devoted to an uneasiness with the pace with which the world is evolving and our obliviousness to the decay of the quality and frequency of human interactions. However, the band goes beyond common place messages throughout the album and successfully engages with the theme while raising other questions and drafting answers. The title track works especially well because of its honest and straightforward lyrical content that still manages to summon powerful imagery that resonate profusely. Certainly The Suburbs initiates the concept album at the heart of its theme but it also holds so much more. I'd go as far as to say that it is really a love song at its core - "So can you understand / Why I want a daughter while I'm still young? / I want to hold her hand / And show her some beauty / Before this damage is done". Rococo is another stellar track that transports the listener back in time, in a period of democratization of culture to the newly formed bourgeois class during which more and more had access to varying forms of art and patronage had become more of an economic affair than ever before. Meticulously written, the chorus' seemingly simple structure briefly invites rock operatic chimes into the album while Butler deconstructs the word 'rococo' twirling it and stretching it until it doesn't make any sense anymore. "The Suburbs" is much more than the sum of its parts - its over an hour long parts! As Win Butler puts it, "[Arcade Fire is] an album band". And they manage to make the 16-track piece feel like a perfectly calibrated album. Special attention has been paid to shifts of pace in between tracks - for example from Month of May to Wasted Hours or between Half Light I and Half Light II (No Celebration) -, as well as within tracks - masterfully done in hypnotic Suburban War that gets the listener preparing for something pressed by martial drums. As a concept album, a lot of the lyrical content bounces off different tracks and emerges in others. The recurring "First they built the road / Then they built the town" loops and devours itself, like the sprawling suburbs Butler sings about. The note on which the album ends in The Suburbs (continued) perfectly locks in with the opening track; this time Butler's voice is disguised in a robotic veil, admitting "If I could have it back / All the time that we wasted / I'd only waste it again / Waste it again and again and again", to a shiver-enducing bassline that momentarily frees you for gravity's clutches. Even so, hypotheticals are not the bread and butter of "The Suburbs". Neither is nostalgia truthfully. Yes, Butler sporadically sings about behavorial changes that have exacerbated the ugly in us - "We used to wait for it / Now we're screaming, 'sing the chorus again'" - but Arcade Fire are not yearning for a return to the past - "And all the houses they built in the seventies finally fall / Meant nothing at all" (The Suburbs) - with its failures and broken promises. The seem more preoccupied by the near future, speaking of a "war" that will to them "whatever it will do" (City With No Children), praying to God "I won't live to see / The death of everything that's wild") in the post-apocalyptic Half Light II (No Celebration) that benefits from a Robyn styled electronic touch that plays extremely well with the chords. This cautious outlook on the future feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy as Butler sings "You always seemed so sure / That one day we'd be fighting in a suburban war" inThe Suburbs. In any case, there is clearly something desperate about the "The Suburbs", a sense of urgency that years to be acknowledged, culminating in the bravado of Deep Blue, a lyrical treasure trove whose melody resolves with elegance. It's not wonder "The Suburbs" was met with so much acclaim from the general public. It is also no surprise it still holds its own ten years later. It taps into a generalized frustration while sonically putting a playful spin on a feeling of entrapment that's only grown stronger in the last years. Careful about their position, Arcade Fire succeed in pointing out some faults in society while not placing blame on anyone in particular but rather by asking how we can anticipate and protect ourselves from an uncertain future together. The tantalizing Ready To Start, clearly meant for live audiences, starts with a succession of "I would"s that turn into "Now I'm ready to start" by the end, acting their will and courage into existence. Markus Dravs had his moment and brought forward a sense of drama and opulence, especially in the production of the golden outro. Month of May is also a powerful high-energy punk-inspired track reminding us just how the album was meant to become more and more relevant. Yet, "The Suburbs" isn't a fringe activist songbook. For all its grand statements and talk of resisting the businessmen's agenda, the album is a polished, articulated collection of songs meant to reach the masses and play in arenas where ticket prices skyrocket to stratospheric heights.
Favorite lyrics
"I was only a child then Feeling barely alive when I heard the song from the speaker of a passing car Been praying to a dying star"
Deep Blue
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