album review: arcade fire, the suburbs

Arcade Fire is one of those bands that you kind of have to like when you start realizing what good music is. In the same brainy rock vein as Radiohead or on a bit of a smaller scale, Death Cab for Cutie, they’re a group that you have to have on your iPod when people you want to like you are going to see it. I was first exposed to their genius after an event I did in 2007 to support refugees in Darfur and the song “No Cars Go” was used in the promo video.

Almost immediately, I had Neon Bible and was really impressed. Arcade Fire achieves a sweeping notion of sound through its use of organs, string and horn arrangements, xylophones, male/female lead vocals and layering of harmony. The band keeps us interested, though, because everything is in moderation; there are just as many quiet songs as there are stadium rockers, and right when you get sick of the chanting or organ, they slow it down. They are the only band I’ve ever heard where in their repertoire you can really see how they’ve melded minimalist instrumental music with rock-and-roll.

While I admit that I find their act old sometimes, Arcade Fire has to be respected for the mark it made on indie music. Sometimes, though, I feel like I can’t listen to a whole album through because I get sick of the slow intro-rising verses and bridge-choral climax-slow outro formula.

Enter The Suburbs. Easily in the top five best albums of 2010, The Suburbs works out everything that used to annoy me about Neon Bible and Funeral. Where Funeral was too minimalist and Neon Bible too sad and operatic, The Suburbs relies on upbeat piano-driven melodies and a stripping of the vocal layering that lead singer Win Butler favored so much on the previous albums. This production technique really allows for the band’s intelligence and sheer talent to shine through much more easily than in previous work. The Suburbs has a central theme of dealing with the effects of modernization and getting older. I am at a point in my own personal life, having moved into Brooklyn from my native suburban New Jersey and beginning a new chapter in my professional life, where these ideas of making peace with the past are all I contemplate.

The Suburbs is a really smart album. The tangible themes of growing up, growing old, moving away, and settling down can be identified through similar sound and reoccurring words. Certain songs dealing with the same idea have similar melodies, which gives the albuma coherence usually reserved for dissertations. While there are still echoes of the style we’ve come to expect from Arcade Fire – varied vocals, sweeping sound arrangements that build from the bottom up and somehow always manage to break simultaneously as the lead singer stresses the thesis of each song – the themes are more adult.

Some might call The Suburbs an aging hipster record, and I can’t really disagree, but I think it’s more than that. The band has developed its sound into something with which we aren’t quite familiar because it aptly demonstrates both their creativity and intelligence.

There are essentially three sections to The Suburbs. The first third deals with the band’s realization that it has become old.  Beginning track “The Suburbs” reflects on growing up against a piano-driven beat and reveals the single-most important idea in the album: “sometimes I can’t believe it, I’m movin’ past the feelin’”. What the feeling actually is changes throughout the album, but I see it as taking a trajectory from realization to spite to finally, acceptance. “Modern Man” reflects both how modern industry has really changed our interactions with people and culture, which is best reflected in the lyric “In line for a number but you don’t understand/Like a modern man”. This idea of blindly accepting the world that surrounds you instead of thinking for yourself is something that has plagued artists forever, but the way Arcade Fire has tied that to nostalgia and growing up against a backdrop of generally upbeat sound is special.

“Rococo” is where Butler and co. switch the tone from contemplative to spiteful. They really poke their fun at the young hipsters that have dominated their audience over the past few years. The idea to “go downtown to watch the modern kids” that “use words they don’t understand” like “rococo” is interesting because we hear an open honesty packaged into a catchy pop song, but the motivating idea behind it is spiteful in nature. Their parody of the hipsters is at least partly rooted in self-loathing; this past summer, Arcade Fire became the first cornerstone indie group to sell out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row. They are one of the major bands that shape hipster culture.

The final and longest third of the album revolves around nostalgia, plain and simple. Beginning with “Suburban War”, an upbeat anthem for anyone who has ever felt both the loneliness knowing no one once you’ve left home and the intense hatred for staying where you’ve grown up for too long, the tension of change Butler so honestly expresses contrasts brilliantly against a repetitive, guitar-and-drum-driven beat. “Wasted Hours” matures on this theme, with the main message “Wasted hours that you made new turned into a life that we could live”. “We Used to Wait” has already garnered a lot of attention, as the band released an HTML5, interactive and Google-fueled video also makes sense with the theme of growing up and settling down with its refrain “Now our lives are changing fast, hope that something pure can last”.

The last song, “The Suburbs (Continued)” song is a slower, more haunting, Funeral-esque reprise of the first. Typical to the calculated-to-be-cool style from the Arcade Fire we’ve come to know and love, this echo of a last song contains the true thesis of this album: “If I could have it back, all the time that we wasted I’d only waste it again. If I could have it back, I’d love to waste it again.” So no matter how nostalgic or regretful we get of the past, it’s our past to be somehow ashamed and proud of all at once. This idea, the conclusion of The Suburbs, doesn’t necessarily break new artistic ground, but the way in which Arcade Fire reached the conclusion is really worth listening to.