album review: arcade fire – the suburbs

Suburban sprawl seemed like an unlikely target for inspiration and an album worth of material when Arcade Fire announced their third LP, The Suburbs, in May. We’ve seen them tackle the complexities of youth, family and death (Funeral) and monopolizing institutions (Neon Bible), but strip malls and housing developments?

The Suburbs is an ode to Win and Will Butler’s memories of growing up in suburban Texas, but it’s also a record that digs much deeper than simple autobiography and comes up with gold. Arcade Fire have created a masterpiece with deeper themes like growing up and moving on, wasted youth and a society in which things built so close together can seem so far apart.

Take, for example, “Wasted Hours,” a gorgeous slow jam on the record’s backend. It’s built on light percussion and a simple, repetitive yet elegant guitar riff. Like we’ve come to expect from Arcade Fire, the instrumentation is pristine but on closer inspection, Butler’s lyrics are what stand out and re-ground us in what this record is all about: “Spent the summer staring out the window/The wind it takes you where it wants to go/First they built the road, then they built the town/That’s why we’re still driving around and around/And all we see are kids in buses longing to be free.”

It’s hard to pull out standouts from a record this lush in its orchestration and lyricism and relentless in its exploration of an overarching theme. There are guitar-driven rockers (“Modern Man,” “City With No Children), there are piano-heavy ballads (“We Used To Wait,” “The Suburbs”) and string-laden epics (“Rococo,” “Empty Room”), even a little bit of ABBA-esque disco (“Sprawl II [Mountains Beyond Mountains]”). The Suburbs strikes a perfect balance between these types of song, never relying too heavily on one instrument or one band member.

Length is this record’s Achilles Heel. It’s obvious the band had some troubles cutting the album down and at a little longer than an hour, it can be tough to make it all the way through. A few more edits to cut the time by just ten minutes could have made The Suburbs even more of a masterpiece, but it’s tough to point to which songs could have or should have gotten the axe.

The Suburbs’ strongest hand is in its overarching themes of just what the suburbs are and mean to the people growing up there. On “Suburban War,” Butler yearns to get out: “In the suburbs I/I learned to drive/And you told me we would never survive/So grab your mother’s keys/We leave tonight.” That youthful angst and frustration with a place a supposed utopia that’s actually a personal hell saturates this record. This is how Win and Will Butler felt growing up near Houston Texas, and this is their rally cry and anthem for today’s modern suburban kids who feel the same way.

On “Rococo,” Butler damns the corporations and construction companies treating suburbia like a rotating wheel of opportunity. “They build it up just to burn it back down/The wind is blowing all the ashes around/Oh my dear god, what is that horrible sound?” We hear similar frustrations on “Sprawl (Flatland).” Backed by haunting cacophony of piano and strings, Butler croons: “Let’s take a drive through the sprawl/Through these towns they built to change/And then you said ‘Emotions are dead’/It’s no wonder you feel so estranged.”

The record’s potent lyrical themes and impeccable instrumentation are polished to perfection on the title tracks that bookend the album. The opener, “The Suburbs” is a simple piano-and-acoustic-guitar anthem in which Butler again implores “grab your mother’s keys, we’re leaving” while also craving something greater for his children: “I want a daughter while I’m still young/I want to hold her hand/Show her some beauty before all this damage is done.” That’s what this record is really all about: frustrating memories from a youth viewed as wasted in suburban hell.

Then there’s the closer, “The Suburbs (continued),” the most gorgeous, rich and deep song on The Suburbs. At 1:28, it’s by far the shortest song on the record, but it doesn’t take long to get its point across. As a lush symphony of strings swirls around, Win Butler and wife Regine Chassagne end the record on a nostalgic note: “If I could have it back/All the time that we wasted/I would love to waste it again.” It’s a sweet and hopeful tone rarely witnessed over the course of the record, one that gives us reason to believe that Butler & co. are done regretting wasted youth. Rather, as they grow older, they want to go back and do it all again.

Rating: 9.4/10

(The Suburbs is due out August 3 via Merge Records. Pre-order here.)