ARCADE FIRE

The Suburbs Review / 9.5

By Matthew Dupree, Union Staffer

    I don’t know if I’d cop to calling this a review, but here goes. I love this album. I’ve currently listened to it a paltry two times, but I’m comfortable saying I love it. There are parts I’m not entirely enthralled with, but in service to the greater phronesis of The Suburbs they work. It was always fairly obvious that Arcade Fire owed much of its efficacy to the honest-to-god songsmanship of the Boss (see “Month of May”), but The Suburbs takes that to its logical conclusion in a baroque love letter to that same urgent blue-collar pop sensibility. The same way that Neon Bible cloaked itself in darkness, The Suburbs coats itself in all the sunny promise that the suburbs offer.
     The Arcade Fire’s tendency toward eighth-note ad-infinitum (think “Black Mirror”) is certainly present, to varying levels of effectiveness. “Month of May” gives the chugging guitar pop device depth and urgency, while songs like “Empty Room” seem to simply chug with adequate lushness. The slower tracks on the album, mostly congregated toward the end of the tracklist (as is custom for such an homage), really flesh out the suburban disappointment that is the two in the album’s thematic one-two punch. “Suburban War” has the unpretentious groove of Dire Straits, with a touch of the grand and anthemic for a final refrain “All my old friends, they don’t know me now.” Both “Sprawl (Flatland)” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” contain that uneasy tension of nostalgia for the place one comes from and the memory of how it felt to want to leave (This is a must-listen for anyone with a love-hate relationship with their hometown). The album achieves the same kind of cohesion, intimacy, triumph and urgency that Neon Bible did, and in much more difficult territory to do so.