Arcade Fire: The Suburbs

Two weekends ago, when I finally sat down to listen to Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, an internet person happened to ask me where I was from and how I felt about it. I told her that I was from a suburb of Toronto, and that living here was like being in an emotionally abusive relationship with a really pretty girl: you feel like you could do better, but if you walk away, you'll have to find one. If that doesn't necessarily sum up my feelings about this album, then it surely sums up my feelings about attempting to sum up my feelings about the type of place being described on it. I stared at that question and re-typed my answer for forty minutes before properly replying, and I still didn't feel satisfied. It's tough to really wrap your head around a place that seems oppressive and dull and yet comfortable and welcoming.

All this recursive uncertainty seems in line with the album's intentions: not to pack the idea of the "Suburbs" away into this or that, but to use it as a backdrop against which many peoples' lives -- quiet ones of opportunity and regret -- play out. It could be anything, and it is a lot of things. Ever since that day I've kept revisiting this album, finding myself unable to keep away. It seems so huge, so ominous, yet so familiar even in its strangeness.

Why does it sound so big? Maybe because at times it's willing to sound pretty small. It begins with this nondescript chung-ka-chung riff on the curtain-raising opening track, so homey and down to Earth it's almost not likable. It isn't until the song dissolves into a mantra of "Sometimes I can't believe it / I'm moving past the feeling" that it really starts to grow, become overwhelmed by increasingly-psychedelic guitars that wash up into the sunny skies of the piano backdrop, growing more and more disorienting with each pass. You're starting to get into some serious shit. In places like these all throughout the album, the lyrical narrative and the sound that goes along seems to come off like a ghost story told by flashlight in a tent in the backyard.

The title track bleeds into the first of a few real rippers on the album, the breathless "Ready to Start." The lyrics are chanted at a regular pace, but the guitar moves are so frantic, you can sense the unrest of a teenager eager to get the hell out, a future dad regretting his choices. The song quickly becomes a tornado, and much of the album seems to exist in relation to gathering storms and gathering darkness. Another earlyish highlight is "Rococo," a wringing out of hipster teens that feel too big for their britches in the 'burbs. It's all swimming, anxious strings and stomping rhythmic refrain with a bite. And on and on with atmospheric scene-setters like "Empty Room" and new instant classics like "City With No Children," with its hummable U2-type riff and its almost-singalong chorus (I can imagine someone at karaoke 10 years from now: "Feel like I've been livin' in / A City with no Children in it / A garden left for ruin, uh, buh... da da da da...!")

The song structure and sequencing on this album is remarkable, and is what indicates it is at least attempting to be a great piece of work. I like the structure of the songs on this album: unconventional yet familiar, generally averting verse-chorus-verse-solo, seeming to add together to create a whole rather than chopped-up discrete pop units. They take you down new routes to familiar territory, rearranging their own riffs and lyrics (note the repetition from "Month of May" in "Wasted Hours" as just one easy example.) Lyrics reappear and reconfigure themselves, like houses built from the same plan in different neighbourhoods. Disquieting in their way, because you recognize it as something else. There probably aren't that many different "riffs" or at any rate tunes on this album, yet they work them into such disparate songs and sounds you'd probably not notice. It's fitting, in a way, since it's hard to avoid conformity in the suburbs, where even the nonconformists rebel in unison (admit it.) But you can look at it this way: most film scores work around the same general theme, and The Suburbs is one of the most cinematic albums I've ever heard. It reminds me a lot of Dark Side of the Moon, and you can take that as a compliment or not, depending on your opinion of that album.

The sequencing is unassailable: it rises and falls at its own agenda, like the gloriously serene "Half Light I" and her wild-eyed brother "Half Life II (No Celebration)." Or the somber, doomsaying "Suburban War" followed by the postapocalyptic garage punk pastiche of "Month of May" and then the sentimental yearning of the Neil Youngish "Wasted Hours." It alternates often between old and young, male and female, hopeful and remorseful. Even though my attention tends to wander during this stretch of the album, this effect causes me to never want to skip ahead, because I don't want to disrupt the continuity. So few albums manage to achieve that, even though it should be the goal of all.

The album is capped off by a few more instant classics: the uneasy, raging nostalgia of "We Used To Wait" and the gorgeous, far-beyond-town-limits "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)," an aria masquerading as a new wave single, with its beautiful Regine Chassigne vocal and gesticulating synths, it builds as close as this album gets to a release. A lot of attention gets paid to what-sounds-like-what on this album, and for the record, the whole thing seems to remind me of anything Eno's ever done, (U2, Bowie, even Talking Heads on moments like "We Used to Wait" and "Modern Man," which also brings to mind Smashing Pumpkins' "1979.") It's lushly orchestrated and highly expressive, and makes me think I may have underestimated Owen "Final Fantasy" Pallett, who helped with the string arrangements (and the strings really make this album.) The whole thing, like I said, sounds humongous, which is fitting since when you're in the Suburbs, your meager little problems seem like the most pressing things in the world. Really, that's what this album seems to capture for me about the suburban experience: blowing every little slight and inconvenience so far out of proportion, way beyond rational thought and revealing your severe detachment from real emotional access. The suburbs have produced many great creators, but their creativity was usually borne out of a desire to get the fuck out of the suburbs: this humble (ch'yeah right) reviewer included.

So if, at times, it seems overly morose, overly joyful, overly serious, overly fantastic, that seems to be the point. This is an exaggerated album, to the point where its quiet moments are moments of exaggerated quietness. If I don't always find it the most pleasurable listening experience, I can at least always appreciate its artistic merit. It may not be something you'd put on at a party, but it's definitely something you can sit down with and contemplate. If you put it on in the background, every now and again you'll hear a stray lyric, working on a metaphor or putting a thought together, that makes you stop and tune in, and soon you'll be carried all the way to the end. If you're up for contemplation you'll dig this record, and if you'd rather not, feel free to don't. "Sprawl II" offers "near release," I say, because the album ends with a creepy reprise of the opening track (and is even title "The Suburbs [Continued]") suggesting an inability to escape, like you've finally circled back to your beginning in town. And in a way, that's sadly true, one of the many sad truths the album deals with: you grow up in the suburbs and hate it, you might leave, but then you're likely also to come back and start your own family there.

Whether The Suburbs is a definitive statement about the suburbs themselves, I won't say. It definitely manages to get a great deal of material out of the setting and feelings associated with it. Whether or not I think it's the best thing ever, I can definitely recognize that it's a damn good piece of work, and at the end of this review, I find myself thinking back to what I said when the album won the Grammy award for Album of the Year: this album was the only deserving winner "not in terms of quality, but in terms of effort, creativity and spirit." Here is music with real value: not just a collection of potential hits, but something that took great care and attention to detail to be itself. And it sounds pretty awesome while doing it. Even if you tune out from the lyrics, half or more of the songs will have you bobbing your head excitedly.

It's good music, and of course it doesn't have to be for everyone. But I will say that, if you've checked out a few tracks and are curious, don't hesitate any longer. With this album getting a bit more attention, we may have a mini-Nevermind on our hands, where something enjoyed by a select group can justifiably find wider attention and convert a lot of people who resisted. Myself included.

Buy this album from iTunes now!