The Suburbs

To come out with a concept album, in this day and age of downloaded songs, seems like a willful thumb in the eye of the music zeitgeist. Yet Arcade Fire has done just that, crafting a thoughtful, nostalgic suite of songs concerning growing up in the suburbs. It is called, simply, The Suburbs.

When I say nostalgic, I mean it in the original definition of the word, which was a mental disorder. The narrators of these songs is indelibly marked by his childhood in the soul-deadening suburbs. He has a fond recollection--the first line of the first track is "In the suburbs I learned to drive," but more often that not the weight of his upbringing seems to crush him. A line from "Wasted Hours" goes, "You watch the life you're living disappear, and now I see, we're still kids in buses, longing to be free." He even goes further in "Deep Blue," ascribing the inevitable collapse of civilization to the suburbs: "We watched the end of the century, compressed on a tiny screen. A dead star collapsing and we could see that something was ending. Are you through pretending, we saw the signs in the suburbs?"

Musically the album starts with a jaunty, juke-joint piano sound, and the first four songs are up-tempo. But after a while the music settles into a dirge-like rhythm that begins to wear on the listener. That is, until the last full song, called "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)," which is by far the most dynamic song of the collection. It is reminiscent of Peter Gabriel (specifically "Solsbury Hill") and early '80s synth-pop. It is the only song on the record that has a lead vocal by Regine Chassagne (the others are sung by Win Butler), and she positively soars. The lyrics are both elegiac and joyous, as she lets us know that everyone around her has tried to stifle her creativity, but she will prevail. "Living in the sprawl, the dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains and there's no end in sight. I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights!"

That song, as does "Sprawl I (Flatland)" makes reference to an incident in both the male and female singers lives, when they ride bikes to park after dark and are surprised by cops. In "Sprawl I," the singer recalls the policeman asking him, "The last defender of the sprawl said, 'Where do you kids live?' Well, sir, if you only knew what the answer is worth, I've been searching every corner of the Earth."

There are similarities to their last album, Neon Bible, though that record was much richer musically. They do break out the church organ so commonly used on that record in the song "Rococo," but otherwise The Suburbs is made up of songs that tend to blend into one another. They are still primarily working in minor keys, though, and the effect is not one that inspires finger-snapping.

The suburbs have taken a beating in literature almost since their inception following World War II, and it's well-trod ground. But Arcade Fire, to their credit, have given the topic a different spin. The recurring image of kids riding bikes by the manicured lawns in the twilight is quite evocative. Overall this is a fine record, and "Sprawl II" is a song that I will be putting in my CD player and hitting the repeat button.