Arcade Fire & the slow burn of The Suburbs

The Suburbs

When I first downloaded Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs"/"Month of May" single earlier this summer, I was underwhelmed by what I heard. I was certain, though, that like most Arcade Fire songs, they needed to be heard in the context of the whole album. Well, I have the whole album now and I'm happy to report that my optimism was rewarded. The Suburbs is a huge, ambitious work that, like most great albums, offers things to discover with every listen.

In the aughts, Arcade Fire managed to secure a position as perhaps the most important indie rock band in this hemisphere on the strength of of its first two albums -- Funeral and Neon Bible. Each album was a treatise on social decline and modern alienation told in a series of rock songs. While most bands write albums that are collections of tunes, Arcade Fire compose song novels. Each song is little more than a chapter of the larger work. It might contain greatness, but it lacks outside the whole.

This is especially true of The Suburbs, which finds Arcade Fire without its usual bombast. Arrangements are not grandiose. Tempos shift, but never break into that end-of-the-universe groove of Funeral. Lead singer Wim Butler's voice is as melodic as usual, but never hits the hell-is-coming pitch of Neon Bible. The initial listen will likely leave the experienced Arcade Fire fan puzzled. The songs are catchy, well done, but unlike Arcade Fire songs of the past, they don't seem to sound like a whole lot.

But the subtlety is part of Butler's art here. This is a controlled, slow burn to each song -- the slick production a veneer under which there is a lot of life. The album finds Butler on a deserted suburban road contemplating his suburban childhood, his career as an artist and similar Arcade Fire concerns -- the decline of culture witnessed in everything from suburban sprawl (there are two songs titled "Sprawl") to modern life without letters ("We Used to Wait").

Like any great work of literature, The Suburbs is rife with conflict. In the opening, title track, Butler sets the conflict. He sings of a "suburban war," of suburban ennui and of the pointless conflicts of youth.

     You always seemed so sure

     that one day we'd fight in In a suburban war 

     your part of town against mine 

     I saw you standing on the opposite shore 

     By the time the first bombs fell 

     we were already bored 

     we were already bored

But later, in the same song, he admits to a beauty and innocence of his childhood in the very same suburbs.

     Can you understand
     why I want a daughter while I'm still young?
     So I can hold her hand
     and show her some beauty
     before all the damage is done

Here and in later songs, like "Half Light I "and "Half Light II", he remembers the boredom and the danger of the suburbs, but finds himself back, looking to escape the city and return to a feeling he had as a child. He recognizes, sadly, that he is too late. The good he remembered is slipping quickly away.  Of course, Butler is never specific. These themes drift through the 16-song collection, resurfacing again and again in different times and places. These are conveyed in bits of lyrics that don't ever form clear pictures but rather emotional connections. These can be songs about him, But they are also songs about us.

The only exception are places throughout the record where Butler  appears to contemplate his music about his music career. In "Rococo" he mentions "kids" (they figure prominently throughout the whole record) who describe art with the term Rococo without understanding what it means. He mentions businessmen who suck his blood "just like the kids in art school said they would. " In  "Month of May," Butler sings of kids with their arms folded tight, building things up to tear them down. (Pitchfork music critics maybe?)

Butler gets even more interesting. On "City with no Children In It" he sings:

     You never trust a millionaire
     quoting the sermon on the mount
     I used to think I was not like them
     but now I have my doubts.

Could he be singing about himself? Could be. He might also be singing more generally about art and its place in suburban culture. Towards the end of the album, on "Sprawl II," Butler's wife Regine Chassagne sings: "They heard me singing and they told me to stop. Quit these pretentious things and just punch a clock." It's a sentence with which every creative person who ever grew up in the suburbs can quickly identify.

Ultimately, The Suburbs is yet another ambitious work of art that succeeds in doing much more than most albums do. It's a picture of growing up for many of us. A tale of a cycle from childhood to adulthood, a precipice on which Butler looks around and doesn't see a sign of what used to be. In fact, he's never been sure what the suburbs were or even where they were.  On "Sprawl I," Butler sings:

     The last offender of the sprawl
     said where do you kids live?
     why sir if you only knew what the answer's worth
     we've been searching every corner of the earth.

When the album closes with "The Suburbs (continued)," a reprise of the first track, Butler leaves the listener with a longing for innocence -- a theme well explored on Funeral. The thing that threatens the suburbs, we realize,  is not just sprawl, it's the death of everything wild. The suburbs are the extension of modern man's desire to impose order on everything. That wildness, the chaos ( he remembers kids screaming and running through the yard in the first song) is that fading beauty he wants to show a daughter he doesn't yet have.

     If I could have it back
     all the time that I wasted
     I would waste it again
     If I could have it back
     I'd love to waste it again.
     Waste it again and again and again...

He repeats the chorus from the first song: "Sometimes I can't believe it/ I'm moving past the feeling (and into the night)." For Butler, the suburbs of his youth were both an age and a feeling he wishes he could have back, but of course he never will. And neither will we.

The Suburbs may just be the best album from Arcade Fire so far. What separates it from the first two records is that Butler has finally learned to be subtle. He uses that here to terrific effect and to create what is really the most successful concept record I've heard in years. It just may be the one of the best albums ever. I don;t write those words lightly. There's nothing like heaping this kind of high praise on a work of art that's barely a week old. But I'm confident this album will endure for a long time to come.