Zak Jason reviews Arcade Fire’s new album, The Suburbs, and finds beauty amidst the sprawl.
Arcade Fire’s third album, The Suburbs, is an hour-long antithesis of the Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood theme song. For sixteen lusciously layered tracks, the Canadian megagroup proclaims that, far from beautiful, our day is smeared in decay, greed, and uncertainty.
From the onset, the band makes clear that the times are a-fadin’. In “The Suburbs,” the deceptively frolicking opener—rolling with rag-time piano—front man Win Butler groans, “I want a daughter while I’m still young / I want to hold her hand, to show her some beauty / before the damage is done.”
Moments later, in the gritty-guitar driven “Ready to Start,” Butler notes, “All the kids have always known that the emperor wears no clothes / but they bow down to him anyway / because it’s better than being alone.” With a buoyant Americana melody, the third track, “Modern Man,” echoes Tom Petty. But while Petty would have crooned about barroom banter and small town romance, Arcade Fire holds a more sober view of today’s manhood: “You’re in line for a number, but you don’t understand / like a modern man.”
Though the lyrics lean toward defeatist, the music throbs with conviction and purpose, as the seven-piece blare unrelenting batches of amthems. In “Rococo,” a funeral dirge moans alongside swirling delirious violins that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Disney cartoon. In “Suburban War,” a marching tribal drum morphs the song into a battle score. Hand-claps and growling guitar solos surge through “In The Month of May.”
These dynamic constructions earned them credit on their first two releases, Funeral and Neon Bible. But something new also plays throughout The Suburbs: the 80s. Warbling blips that sound like robotic rattle snakes in “Ready to Start,” new wave pomp in “Half Light II,” dirty synths in “Sprawl II”—accompanied by Butler’s desolate images, the electronica accents make The Suburbs an apocalyptic hoedown.
Arcade Fire think it’s an ugly, even hopeless day in the neighborhood. But if people listen to enough music as gorgeous and human as theirs, they may have to change their tune.
About Zak Jason
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[...] been fondled by the press corp. Arcade Fire’s “Rococo” has been called a funeral dirge that, “moans alongside swirling delirious violins that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Disney cartoon,… and a “wake up call to the Obama generation.” Both songs feature a similar [...]