Album Review : Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

It opens, and closes, with the title track - a smorgasbord of cherry picked phrases from 55 years of popular music with ‘want to hold your hand’ and ‘the damage done’ spilling out in quick succession. It’s a strange choice musically for an opener with the more suitable and more atypical Arcade Fire sound of ‘Ready To Start’ in the #2 slot – lyrically though, as a statement of intent, it maps out the cul-de-sacs and avenues the record will wander around. The repeated piano refrain brings to mind Ed Harcourt’s ‘Apple of My Eye’ and Sleepy Jackson’s ‘Good Dancers’ (The latter is more evident on the short, closing version of the song).

As you’d expect from what is essentially a double album in old money (its 16 tracks run just shy of 65 minutes) that explores one theme, there’s a lot of treading on well-worn ground, whether it be Butler nostalgically recalling his youth or lamenting the sense of directionless ennui that the he felt growing up in the suburbs around Houston. The album’s genesis was in Butler reconnecting with an old friend and it’s quite easy to imagine how, like the food critic in Ratatouille, a trickle of memory became an overwhelming flood. This is most obvious on ‘City With No Children’ a lament to Houston by name.

The subject matter on the album seems to either fall into the literal tales of childhood or the allegorical variety where you are sometimes left trying to marry up a song about the chess playing computer (‘Deep Blue’) with the overall theme, which is so sprawling and encompassing (The boredom and trappings of suburban American lives, 1970 to present) that it’s very easy to over analyse every single line and attach false meaning to it. Is ‘Deep Blue’ about the struggle between man and machine or not? We don’t mind dwelling on these theories, it’s an important part of song-writing to “show not tell”, but the game is played too often and sometimes not well on The Suburbs. Butler is too literal at times and at others not explicit enough, leaving us not really sure what he is trying to say exactly.

Coupled with this abstraction there’s a distinct lack of songs that hit you square in the solar plexus on the first go round. The centrepiece of the album ‘Half Light I’ and ‘Half Light II (No Celebration)’ invoke the dreamy, string backed reflective parts of Funeral, with the former employing a chugging reggae riff a la ‘Paper Planes’ / ‘Straight To Hell’ the later dissolving into British Sea Power covering Doves’ ‘There Goes The Fear’. Indeed it’s very easy to remember that Arcade Fire were once pigeon holed as the Canadian BSP with the sonorous, coruscating guitar liberally sprinkled across the album. Our notes are also peppered with ‘outstays welcome’ ‘goes on a bit’ ‘a minute too long’ and ’outro doesn’t really do much’ up and down the track listing.

The other major complaint is the way that Butler seems to have an issue with the band’s fans, never really a good thing to dwell on. While at the start of their career the band were imploring that “Us Kids Know”, here the kids are following tends to save face on ‘Ready To Start’. Even worse is surely the nadir of the band’s career so far, ‘Rococo’ - not just a repetitive dirge of a song but a bilious festival of sneering. Here the kids are hipster douchebags and Butler isn’t shy about letting us know how objectionable he finds them. Unfortunately ’Positively 4th Street’ it ain’t. The other song that we really don’t have any time for is ‘Month of May’ - described by some as glam or punk but in reality it sounds like Mud or a late seventies pub-rock borefest about nothing.

Most of the album consists of atmospheric, quieter moments like the ‘Revolution #1’ feel of ‘Wasted Hours’ or the Lifes Rich Pageant era R.E.M. of ‘Suburban War.’ Where the guitars are given centre strange they aren’t just reaching for the stratosphere, they chime and ping away like Peter Buck’s (again on ‘Modern Man’) or like that one from Coldplay does. The only thing that brought me back to ‘Deep Blue’ was the guitars lapping themselves like Magazine used to do. There’s even ‘Sprawl I’ which has a baroque English-folk feel.

There’s not much that really stands out as a radical reinvention of Arcade Fire’s sound, bar the shoegazing drone in the core of ‘Empty Room’ and the underwater strings (as heard on My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Loomer’) on ‘Suburbs II’ and the revelation that is ‘Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)’ – here, Regine takes the vocals and it’s impossible not to talk about it without mentioning Abba or Debby Harry. It glitters and shimmers and despite her chipmunkish singing voice sounding like she might launch into ‘Optimistic Voices’ from Wizard of Oz it’s by far the most endearing and grin-inducing moment on the record.

While the band have, in the main, gone out of the way not to record another album of songs like the big singles on Funeral, it’s the songs that invoke it that are the most intriguing - on ‘Suburban War’ the mad race to all be crashing and banging their instruments at once seems a little forced and not as thrilling as it once did. On the other hand though the track that most recalls the Talking Heads and New Order path of ‘Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)’, ‘We Used To Wait’ is the best thing on here and probably the only song that is as immediate as Funeral’s best songs. With what could be theme from Gremlins bubbling behind it Butler laments the loss of the intimacy and excitement of something as simple as waiting for the post to arrive with hand-written correspondence. We don’t need to dwell on what the symbolism may or may not be here because the music is too exciting to let our minds wander.

Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible was criticised in some quarters for not being another Funeral. This forgets that a few of the songs on their debut weren’t even in the same league as the very best songs on it. Some people found their second album to be too overbearing and preachy. They don’t do pomposity nor over the top theatrics on The Suburbs for the main. This record either whispers key points or bludgeons you with a hammer to get them across again and again. While the bulk of the songs on the album are good or very good they sound better together with the thematic threads interweaving between them.

Arcade Fire haven’t gone as far as some do on their third album by standing at the very top of their game and looking down at their peers from on high. We hope that the opening of their musical palette to include more from the early 1980s leads to more experimentation musically on their next record and one that will really challenge them and maybe us. Arcade Fire know that they aren’t the sensation that they were in 2004 anymore and like the suburbs themselves they can’t get back there. The difference is that whilst they’d be happy to go back and ‘waste it again’ in the suburbs, they don’t want to be that band again.