Where Arcade Fire’s mastery and perfectionism and beauty and splendour roots itself is from the combination of, and simultaneous realisation of; their collective passion, emotion, meticulousness and indeed, their lyrical messages. In their third offering, this alloy itself blends and produces a band who with,
The Suburbs, have produced an album harbouring tangible emotive substance and an abundance of ethereal and melodic beauty.
What speaks to the listener is not just the wealth of instrumental dexterity and musicianship, but the overarching concept which pervades the albums’ lyrics and tone. This is not a moodish or teenage “anti-establishment” album. (It in part is a criticism of such a flaccid position.) The Jesus of Suburbia here is self-aware, self-criticising and, to an extent, self-effacing. A critique of such maturity and awareness is redolent of Frank Zappa (“There’s no way to delay that trouble coming every day,” Zappa penned on the 1966 album Freak Out!), and on many levels Win Butler’s lyrics and expressions are Zappa-esque (to a point), transmuted into 21st Century vernacular; enforced with a commercial awareness, but leveled with an almost religious intensity.
To contextualise, a third LP release is of course an extremely important one. It is where bands can implant themselves in the contemporary and historical consciousness and in effect, live on. In 1964 Bob Dylan gave a crystalline example of this with his third studio release The Times They Are a-Changin’. This example is replicated with Blur’s Parklife, Radiohead’s OK Computer, Smashing Pumpkin’s Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness, Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven and The Smith’s The Queen is Dead. (A parallel set of examples can also be laid out for the other side of this angle. Oasis’ creative peak had already been exhausted come Be Here Now. The Killers’ Day & Age and Razorlight’s Slipway Fires are two more recent examples of how bands can slip out of the ‘loop’ as it were should their third offerings be under-par. It is not a concrete acid-test but it is an example that works often.) With their debut, The Funeral, Arcade Fire created a wide reaching and lamentful offering, combining desolation and despair and twisting it with a pining for community and support, “And if my parents are crying/ Then I’ll dig a tunnel/ From my window to yours…You climb out the chimney/ And meet me in the middle/ The middle of town,” Butler howls on its opening track Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels). With Neon Bible, the band enhanced this by in part criticising the populist absorption of world-views in and of itself. Playing on the religious side of this coin in Intervention, Butler sings, “Been working for the Church while your life falls apart/ Singing Hallelujah with the fear in your heart/ Every spark of friendship and love, will die without a home/ Hear the soldier groan, ‘We’ll go at it alone.’” - Speaking out against the obsequiousness that Butler seems to suggest is a by-product of the religious impulse.
This leaves us with The Suburbs. In some cases, the concept of this album is a fusion of the previous two, at others it knowingly contradicts the other two; giving us a unique take on an unoriginal idea. Where The Funeral had community spirit, The Suburbs seems devoid of it, and this is Butler’s attempt to pinpoint his finger on the pulse of the social zeitgeist. This is pursued with slightly more polished production than Neon Bible, the layered tracks are far more effective than some of their previous album’s less impressive offerings (Black Wave/Bad Vibration could have hugely benefited from some of this production).
In other words, this is Arcade Fire’s stab at creating an existential album. Expressing angst and despair indefatigably throughout the album, but resonating such expressions with an awareness and at times, an acceptance, that this condition is insurmountable. Whether it be the Modern Man’s inability to connect with others, “So I wait my turn I’m a modern man/ And the people behind me they can’t understand.” Or his inability to express such frustration productively, “In my dream I was almost there/ But you pulled me aside and said, ‘You’re going nowhere.’”
Such frustration is also vented towards the ‘Modern Kids’.
Rococo in all likelihood could have been called ‘Modern Kids’ – but as a play on the message Butler’s lyrics expresses – that of the pretentiousness and sheepishness of the hipster culture (a culture which encompasses the bulk of the band’s fanbase it has be noted) – he names it after a French artistic movement,
“Let’s go downtown and watch the modern kids/ They will eat, right out of your hands/ Using great big words that they don’t understand.” Such a thematic concept is replete throughout the album; these ‘Modern Kids’
“don’t know what game they’re playing,” – what Butler thinks we need more of, is children. In
City With No Children Butler makes a two pronged Biblical allusion, the first being towards the futility of not holding yourself in the same vein as ‘society’ and the realisation that he too, is part of the problem,
“Never trust a millionaire, quoting the Sermon on the Mount/ I used to think I was not like them/ But I’m beginning to have my doubts.” As well as this there is a pining for the bliss, impressionability and debonair approach to life taken by children(Biblical in the sense that it has the injunction that we ‘become like children’). Butler alludes to the famous tale ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ – a tale which appears to speak out against the ruling class, but more specifically shows that children have the guile and energy to do such protesting, whereas others do not,
“All the kids have always known/That the emperor wears no clothes.” In a
City With No Children though, there is no one to do this, “But to bow down to them anyway/Is better than to be alone.” In this search for childhood, and in attempting to recreate and re-find such experiences by searching for the,
“house where we used to stay” or the,
“places we used to play” they are searching on a fruitless tree; they have,
“been searching every corner of the Earth.” – to no avail. (This is expressed most impressively in
Wasted Hours, a song which is a slight nod to Grizzly Bear.)
It is this search for meaning, in a mechanical (“First they built the road/ Then they built the town/ That’s why we’re still driving around and around.”), emotionally stagnant (“I would rather be alone/ Than pretend I feel alright.”) and forever changing (“This town’s so strange/ They built it to change”) worldly landscape which Arcade Fire are painting here. They realise that this search is in an Empty Room, a song Régine Chassagne controls as the band weave out magical sound-scapes, “Searching in, an empty room…I’m alone again.” So ultimately, we are caught in a perpetual and impossible to solve predicament, searching and never finding(“If I could have it back/All the time we wasted/I’d only waste it again.), and trying to make their own meaning amidst a world who scowls at their outlet, and effectively tells them to grow up, “They heard me singing and they told me to stop/ Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.”
They have searched in the existential, and have found something between absurdism and nihilism. Neither Win nor Régine offer any sign of hope or consolation, having dismantled all forms of it in the hour long journey of The Suburbs; and it is this grim reality that they succumb to. The businessmen are going to drink their blood, and they’re going to let them.
Lyrics – 9.5/10
Instrumentation – 8/10
Production – 8.5/10
Giving this 87%.
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Here is the album cover
And this photo is nice too
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