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Album review: Is Arcade Fire's 'The Suburbs' worth a visit?

Listen to the band's third full-length in it's entirety

By Katie Hasty Monday, Aug 2, 2010 12:48 PM

Album review: Is Arcade Fire's 'The Suburbs' worth a visit?

Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs"

Credit: Merge

It’d be a farce to compare Arcade Fire’s new album “The Suburbs” to its previous couple of efforts – 2007’s “Neon Bible” and 2004 debut “Funeral.” The Montreal-based rock outfit proves itself to be a new band with each new record. What each has, though, is a running theme, and each a march down memory lane. 

For this one, its concept is the title: the term “Suburbs” sparks imagery of safety, samey-samey and family. For frontman Win Butler, the suburbs bring up strong (dis)illusions of his upbringing outside of Houston and his move from there, written in love letters and hate mail.
 
It all begins with the bounding piano-led title track, like an ornate, sunny arch entryway, tricking one into thinking this drive through the ‘burbs is gonna be easy. The arch falls down on its plywood supports as “Ready to Start” proves to be the real mood-setter, with its ominous strings and polarizing lyrics: “All the kids have always known / the emperor wears no clothes / but bow down to him anyway / it’s better than being alone.” In a perfectly paced chorus, he sings “If I was scared, I would / If I was bored, you know I would / If I was yours, but I’m not / Now I’m ready to start” waging an ambiguous battle against the false idols (and straw men) of his idyllic prison.
 
The rest of the album continues this trend, in Christian metaphors, narrative attacks on “the kids” sung with a snarl and a mix of nostalgia and dread, similar to the sentiment in The National’s “Bloodbuzz OH.” It’s a look back for Butler and his coming into the light, or rather, the “Half Light,” a theme in two movements. “Half Light I” is the cool down from the work-out that is the first half of the record, while “Half Light II” is a another warm-up, with a bleating synthesizer, orchestral umph, a gorgeous build and shared vocals between Win and wife Regine Chassagne on lines like “Pray that god won’t live to see / the death of everything that’s wild.”
 
Regine takes full lead on “Empty Room,” a fast-tempo rocker, with a whale-wail on guitar like a My Bloody Valentine cut; she’s also on closer “Sprawl II,” a dance track that Columbia records probably wished that MGMT wrote instead of “Congratulations.”
 
“Rococo” has great sonic dynamic and melodic ideas, but the lyrics really “burn it back down.” It works better as an art experiment – just like “Suburban War,” which just feels like a long, sad nursery rhyme with an ill-fitting chorus, like two songs cut and pasted together.
 
Snotty punk-ish “Month of May” perfectly transitions into a sweaty exhale, “Wasted Hours,” like plopping down into a hammock on a summer day. That song’s sweet, vulnerable refrain is cheapened with the “la la la las,” making it seem like Arcade Fire is making fun of itself for even writing the tune to begin with.
 
Overall, it’s obvious the band took their time recording “The Suburbs”; the melodies fresh the arrangements creative. In much the same way, Butler’s self-conscious lyrics sound like well-edited drafts of a thesis; he says precisely what he means in a wealth of metaphors, sometimes in ways that only he understands, and sometimes in ways that we all can understand (like in “We Use to Wait”: “Now our lives are changing fast / Hope that something pure can last”).
 
So many songs on “The Suburbs” are perfect – it’s a shame that the album is too long. At 16 tracks, it makes me think they wrote a good amount of material and had a passionate debate over what to cut – or they wrote exactly 16 and couldn’t bear cutting anything at all. Either way, it leaves this listener exhausted and feeling a little bit down; “The Suburbs” is great, really, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" is out tomorrow. Listen to the album in its entirety here; what do you think?

 

Related Searches: Arcade Fire, the suburbs, win butler

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  • Default-avatar

    rl

    The suburbs will echo to anyone who's been raised in the suburbs in the 70s and 80s. Hell, it will echo in anyone who's been raised, in fact.

    Lyrically raw, musically gutsy, it is an album that grows with every listen, when you notice the shared lyrical lines in it's 16 tracks. Fans may also notice some shared themes with the band's previous efforts. The narrator of (Antichrist Television Blues) ,from Neon Bible, seems to appear before the birth of his valued daughter, a daughter he uses to show some beauty to a dead alive world.

    On Funeral, Chassagne didn't have to drive while in the backseat, while here the characters learn to drive in the suburbs, keeping the car running as they hear the sound of it's engine failing.

    This is an album meant to be heard without ever hitting the skip or shuffle buttons. While it runs long at more than a whole hour, the closing track, a reprise of the opener, makes you want to repeat the whole experience all over again.

    A work of sheer brilliance.

    August 2, 2010 at 1:50PM EST Reply to Comment
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    BungaloBilly

    Agree to disagree on the track "Suburban War", I think it's beautiful, one of my favorites on the album, and I find it speaks to me big time. This is definitely album of the year so far, a masterpiece.

    August 2, 2010 at 1:51PM EST Reply to Comment
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      Rondo9 A masterpiece no question

      August 2, 2010 at 2:01PM EST
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    velocityknown

    I'm glad you acknowledged it is impossible to compare their albums. I think the album is the perfect length as I can't imagine any song being cut from the final product.

    A masterpiece indeed and I can't even begin to imagine what they're going to do for their 4th record. Part of the fun of being an Arcade Fire fan knowing it won't be the same as their first three.

    Rococo and Suburban War are two of my favorites. I can already imagine Rococo being chanted at concerts along with Regine's "ooh ooh ooh's"

    The piano hook on Deep Blue, the tempo of Modern Man, the punkness of Month of May, the ragtime feel of The Suburbs, the haunting beauty of Half Light I, the disco popness of Sprawl II. God I love this album!!!

    August 2, 2010 at 3:48PM EST Reply to Comment
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    Becca

    I just found this awesome video of Arcade Fire doing a "Take Away Show," if you're a fan of Neon Bible I suggest you check it out!

    http://www.ourstage.com/blog/2010/8/12/viewer-discretion-advised-la-blogotheque-the-take-away-shows

    August 31, 2010 at 4:44PM EST Reply to Comment

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Katie Hasty

About This Blog

Katie Hasty is HitFix's New York outpost for movies and music. She served as a web editor and columnist for Billboard Magazine for five years, and has freelanced since 1999 -- as a writer, editor, music supervisor, A&R consultant, radio correspondent, recording artist and concert promoter. She plays guitar and sings in her Brooklyn-based band Numbers And Letters, and loves Christmas songs, dark beer, Tom Waits and serial sentences.

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