The Suburbs

Let’s take a moment to remember The Arcade Fire’s previous two albums. First up we have Funeral, a capital moment in music in the last decade. Funeral was an album about death, obviously. It was an album about the way death affects you while growing up; death’s distant but inescapable pull. Death’s pervasiveness. Its inevitability.  Funeral was so personal, you couldn’t help but think you’ve been listening to it since you were born after hearing it for the first time. It’s one of the few times I’ve felt an album’s existed way before its inception in 2004.

Then came Neon Bible, a valiant effort that brought no shame to the band after expectations that could have crushed others appeared. Neon Bible screamed of grandiose ideas, and scary thoughts in a changing world it descended upon.

Now of course, comes The Suburbs. If Funeral was about childhood and growing up, and Neon Bible was about being a grown-up and the angst that comes along with that, The Suburbs fits right between the two. The Suburbs is not about maturity, nor its onset. It’s about maturity’s realization, the singular moment in which one takes a break and realizes it’s over. Childhood’s over, and one knows not what to feel. The Arcade Fire have a clue or two and it comes in the shape of this album.



The Suburbs shouldn’t be broken into tracks, pieces or codas. The band have done so, even splitting up large songs into two-part-affairs (Half-Light and Sprawl I and II, respectively). It’s useless. This is an album that can only be understood as a sum of all its parts. Make no mistake; its parts are monumentally good. The eponymous track is a condensation of all that’s good about this band. Ready to Start is incredibly energetic and passionate. We Used To Wait is a love letter (that sounds more like a good-bye note) to an entire generation’s zeitgeist. You can find bits and pieces of Springsteen and Depeche Mode, Bowie and The Beatles, but it all feels fresh and well-known at the same time.

Taking it all in, it starts to remind me of great classical compositions. The same theme (a mission statement if you will, that appears in the titular track) is to be found all over. Melancholy is the one feeling this album bears birth to. Its picture, one of an empty car is, of course a symbol. A motor can be faintly heard in between a few of the tracks. What’s it all about? Leaving it all behind. Then coming back home when you realize you can never truly leave your past behind. It’s always gnawing at your heels.

But that’s not a bad thing, The Arcade Fire assume. This sometimes bleak album ends on the most human note possible: “If I could have it back, all the time I’ve wasted/ I’d only waste it again…”Win Butler whispers. Who wouldn’t think the same?

I’ve long thought about whether The Suburbs is better then the bands previous two efforts, or how it stands compared to other modern classics. It’s irrelevant. The Suburbs feels out of place. Maybe it would have been better for it to appear in the early 2000s, bridging the gap between so called “classic rock” (or at least what passed as it in the 90s) and “new rock”. Maybe it’s too early for us, and it will reveal all its answers long after its release (a la “Smile”).

Again, that’s not what’s important here. The Suburbs could be aptly described by T S Eliot’s opinion of Joyce’s seminal Ulysses: “it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” So is The Suburbs, an album that’s been inside of us all along, has been revealed and we can’t escape from. But why would we ever want to?

10/10 Stefan