Originally Published on Burlington Music Journal
July 25th, 2010
From the titular opening track Win Butler and Co. situate their third album inside the schmaltzy/menacing signifiers of a Terry Gilliam dystopian suburban nightmare: connector highways, explosions, and adolescent ennui. Half syncopated tin pan alley piano cul-du-sac muzak/half thought police kicking in the front door to burn the books. At first blush it seems like a tired indie rock fatal conceit, Songs about the Corrupt and Fetid Modern World: Urban planning gone horribly awry, hyper-consumerism, daily violence, and nostalgia for a distant, idealized, rococo past. Arcade Fire c. 2010 are able to make it all cohere, equal parts Jane Jacobs and Bruce Springsteen, White Flight references and rhythm section rave ups.
In an age of where there are few bands taking principled stands, pulling off a 60 minute song cycle overflowing with permutations on lines like, "Business Men drink my blood." is no small feat. Clearly the band has a lot on its mind. Perhaps the now seven member band is uniquely positioned to put out an album the synthesizes the bedroom community indie blues of Funeral and the strident "Antichrist Television Blues" social critiques of Neon Bible. There is none of their sophomore LP's sonic or thematic overreach here though, no black mirrors, no lighthouse metaphors, no neon bibles. The sound of The Suburbs: immaculately crafted yet effortless hooks, brilliant orchestral swells, one gets the feeling the arrangements are so you could sing anything over the top of them.
"I feel like I've been living in /A city with no children in it"
An arresting hand clap/telecaster hook serves as an apt foundation for standout track "City With No Children" and its Steinbeck-esque imagery, "A garden left for ruin by a billionaire inside a private prison." Whether the title's referencing of Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's grimy, dystopian City of Lost Children is incidental or intentional remains an open question. What is certain though is that few bands in the post-Goldman Sachs and friends torching the global economy era can elicit such strong feeling singing about dollars and cents. Butler casts himself in Citizen Kane fashion as the billionaire in the private prison in songs final movement (Or perhaps Daniel Day Lewis' fallen King Lear from There Will Be Blood's Shakespearean fifth act). Given the band's success and their -not quite Gates-like but impressive nonetheless- philanthropy, it's a cleverly effective rhetorical flourish. Taking vocal duties for fourteen of the sixteen tracks, The Suburbs clearly represents Win's close-up. His sometimes Boss-like baritone delivers, imbuing an emotional weight to which keeps you listening, even if you don't give a good goddamn about the world at large.
"When we watched the markets crash/ The promises we made were torn"
Album centerpiece "Half Light II (No Celebration)" is the sort of spacious, "big a Anthem," quiet/now rock!/now quiet again song Arcade Fire built their 7 piece collective name on. It begins with a foreboding drone but soon gives way to their familiar speedball of steady floor tom rhythms, and and a choral troop harmonies. By the time the horns kick in the songs final third, the song's Red State/Blue State tension has given way to "the death of everything that's wild." The song aptly evokes America 2010's zeitgeist of hyper-partisanship, great recession, war weariness and coastal salt marshes littered with dead brown pelicans floating in BP's oil. "When we watched the markets crashed" isn't the sort of irony steeped lyric one expects from contemporary indie rock.
Indeed, much as Contemporary American Poetry shed biting commentary for personal lyricism in the final decades of the twentieth century, anglo guitar rock shed the social commentary of the 1970's and early 80's in favor of obtuse scatological verses propped up with whatever emotional weight singers could infuse them with. Sasha Frere-Jones eviscerated this trend in the pages of the New Yorker as a "flat-footed mixture of shaggy, improvisational rock and sylvan curlicues taken from obscure folk groups." Bands from Death to TV on the Radio have long since broken down Frere-Jones' over-simplified racial lines of avant-guitar rock with something to say being as providence of caucasians.
Mountains Beyond Mountains
A cavalcade of bloggers have already rehearsed the unlikely partnership that was forged for Superbowl XLIV: that song from Where the Wild Things are, Haitian Earthquake relief, Regine Chassagne and the NFL. Regine, who's originally Haitian, and the rest of the band, funneled the $1 million licensing payout into Partners For Health, one of the leanest, most effective NGO's on the planet. It's perhaps not coincidental that one of Regine's only lead vocal tracks on The Suburbs, "Mountains Beyond Mountain" shares its title with Partners in Health founder Paul Farmers' biography. Rather than vignettes from the wreckage of Port-au-Prince, its lyrics detail the phenomena of feeling overwhelmed playing the part of representative Haitian amongst the white noise of Montreal's urban glut and blurt: "Cause on the surface the city lights shine/they are calling at me, come and find your kind" and "I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights." It's a prescient reminder that pale suburban ennui is perhaps over-represented in our first world mediatized culture, while underrepresented the developing world's everyday corporate globalized poverty devours on. It's an interesting choice to skew global so late in an album so focused on the First World 'burbs.
For all the heady idealism it references, "Mountains Beyond Mountains" is the rare false step as band stretches their sound into a weird pseudo-Blondie sounding coldblooded new wave. It isn't the only moment on The Suburbs' b-side that sounds as though the focus and lyricism has gotten a little shaky. "Month of May," for all its kinetic fuzzed out bass line, again leaves one itching for A-Side's lyrical highlights, as Win takes easy shots at "Kids with their arms folded tight." So they're guilty, as are so many bands, of cramming a couple too many of their Orwellian songs onto a single album. Had the second act been winnowed away to only include it's most vital tracks, and the album would have a more fulfilling dénouement, one worthy of its most compelling songs. As it is, The Suburbs will instead be merely one of the best albums of one of the best years in music in some time.
In some looking forward/looking backward Brechtian way, this album is like a homecoming. It's at once familiar and yet it's new. One finds oneself trying to place The Suburbs inside constellation of great Guitar Rock Social Commentary albums: The Clash's self titled debut, Gang of Four's Entertainment!, The Boss' Greeting From Asbury Park, Radiohead's OK Computer. Albums that serve as the "invisible legislators" Shelly wanted poets to be, albums that, long past their respective release dates, serve as ways of triangulating the overarching mood of an age for backward looking armchair philosophizers and public intellectuals. It's familiar, emotional territory to be sure, but in a time of overwhelming strife, coming home to the Suburbs just feels right.
Post-script: Apparently the Terry Gilliam reference from the first paragraph proved prescient, as he filmed a live concert movie for Arcade Fire's inaugural stop of their tour this fall.
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