Arcade Fire have returned with an intense, sprawling, sixteen-track monster of a third album that digs through the dregs of lost identity and heartache, staring mortality in the face while casting a musical Molotov cocktail into the scene that both birthed them and anchored them.
It was two years ago that frontman Win Butler began building on the inspiration he found after receiving a letter from an old hometown friend from just outside Houston, Texas. "He sent us a picture of him with his daughter on his shoulders at the mall around the corner from where we lived," says Butler. "And the combination of seeing this familiar place and seeing my friend with his child brought back a lot of feeling from that time. I found myself trying to remember the town that we grew up in and trying to retrace as much as I could remember."
The age-worn memories cast a thematic air over The Suburbs, lending a reflective intimacy to even the most epically ambitious tracks. Nostalgia is a major player on the album, as are the hard realities of the inevitable settling sensation that comes with examining an existence in suburbia - the mundanity, the burdens of responsibility, the struggles, the joy, the dying. It's all here and all very present, from the gorgeous opening title track onward.
If the Decemberists proved themselves champions of the fantasy narrative with last year's astonishing Hazards of Love, then Arcade Fire are their realist counterparts, navigating the avenues of true life with a stirring portrait of the ubiquitous track-housing reality of America. Through the music, the characterized cul-de-sacs on which these folks reside are amplified as metaphors for their spiritual and intellectual experiences and adapted capacities.
"Businessmen, they drink my blood / Like the kids in art school said they would," Butler muses at the onset of dark-pop dancer "Ready to Start," narrating an indie act's rise and ultimate coming to grips with the compromise and oncoming train of ascending popularity. The space is beautiful, like both The Cure and The Smiths decided to leave their whiny bullshit at the door for the sake of grabbing hold of a universal feeling with their combined superpowers.
And what is that feeling? There's a common thread throughout the album, despite multiple singers embodying different characters and perspectives, of realizing the futility of the fight, but not in admission of defeat. It's a philosophically beautiful album, embracing the weight of sorrow and loose-fitting hope together as one, a part of the inevitable universality of our experience. But there's a fire burning beneath, a victory in conveyance, a renewal through reflection that's an important player in the spirit of the entire record.
Producer Markus Dravs captures a lush vibrance in the tones, perfectly conveying a clean delivery and well-rounded sound heavy on nuanced atmospherics - such as on the lush string opening to "Modern Man". The song is a gentle folk-pop journey of upswung melancholy with a simple, devastating and highly singable melody imitated by the guitar line between verses.
The scenester crucifixion "Rococo" follows, chopping acoustics and Disney-demon strings lampooning the modern kids "using great big words that they don't understand" with a habit of building things up just to burn them down again. A weird cuckoo-call chorus section frames the title lyric, crafted elegantly enough to give a buoyant quirk to the track rather than anchor it.
Empty Room sounds anything but empty, with frantic strings giving way to a galloping beat and gliding guitar line as Butler harmonizes the chirpy verse with his wife, Régine Chassagne. The shades-of-"Street-Fightin-Man" track "City With No Children follows," somehow deftly connecting a sedated Beggars Banquet-era Rolling Stones with Conor Oberst in a Bright Eyes mood.
The somber sunrise of "Half Light I" gives way to a sequel far more promising and optimistic, building steadily to a hymnal peak that fades amidst a flurry of layered drum tracks. It's an ample setup for the lost-connection ballad of "Suburban War," remembering an old friend from whom the narrator has found himself on a different musical battlefield. When the change hits and everything is intensified in double-time, Butler's voice trembles as he wails "All my old friends, they don't know me now / All my old friends are staring through me now" yearning for what was with a tangible taste of futility.
Taking a page out of the Eagles of Death Metal playbook, "Month of May" is little more than a single chord eighths-strum with an anthemic, tongue-in-cheek hip-shake vocal melody about the rock audience turning into a scene where "the kids are all standing with their arms folded tight."
The track grows more sinister and dynamic, live-fading to ethereal keys that open "Wasted Hours," a jarring departure into '60s sunshine pop. By sharp contrast, Butler's heartsick croon in "Sprawl I (Flatland)" makes one never want to revisit their old hometown... ever. Color washes back in with Régine's odd German-pop ode on "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)," a track that clearly makes the case that Arcade Fire possess the kind of creative versatility coupled with depth of structural awareness the likes of which we see only every few years, at best.
A brief, palette-cleansing reprise of "The Suburbs" bookends a 16-song, richly spellbinding journey that eclipses 2004's Funeral and its 2007 sequel Neon Bible. There's a clarity and currency of heart at play within these tracks, a finely-tuned meeting of inspiration, vision and ability that will serve as a milestone in what's sure to be a lengthy, illustrious career for Arcade Fire.
A new contender has arrived for the best album of 2010.
Listen to the entire thing here.
CraveOnline's Rating: 10 out of 10
