Arcade Fire's The Suburbs

It's been a bit of a slow restart to writing since I got back from vacation and since today I have a little free time I thought I'd try something I hadn't before: reviewing a piece of music. Arcade Fire is a group I hadn't heard of until just this last summer when my sister came to visit me here in Tokyo. The Suburbs is apparently their newest album.

I've been listening to this for the last couple of months since I returned from my trip, it's been an album I've basically been living life to for that time. Like nearly all of the best music out there, the songs feature lyrics that are fairly ambiguous, not specific, though as a whole the album does most certainly seem to have a common theme which links it all together even though different moods are explored throughout the songs. Coming from the artists, you can feel a definite sense of nostalgia listening to it, one for whom a childhood growing up in the suburbs I figure many others will have in common.

The music is rich and lush thanks to the variety of instruments used, and always uncannily captures the mood of domestic american life, even while seeming strangely evocative of multiple eras of america's recent past. Even without paying attention to the words, the rhythms catch the ear and linger long after the audio has faded like the residual mood after an event or memory (this is especially true on songs like Deep Blue, Sprawl II, and the title track The Suburbs) That's not to say that the lyrics have been neglected, they most certainly haven't, and simultaneously contain cleverly revealed opinions and veiled and conflicting emotions on life in the 'burbs.

In the portrayal of its subject the album is by turns longingly reminiscent of the innocence while at other times a quiet condemnation of the hypocrisy which such a way of life seems to breed within it. The tone ranges from quaint, playful, and youthful (again Sprawl II and the Suburbs) to conflicting and challenging (Modern Man, City with No Children). I was alternately reminded of Leave it to Beaver and other sitcoms from that era, bland, naive, and conventional, and the Sam Mendes films, American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, two of the most castigating. Perhaps more than any other, however, what jumps to my mind is the satire Pleasantville which was both fond and critical at the same time.

The album ends on a mournful sort of a note, a slower more sorrowful version of the its opening and feeling almost like a swan song of sorts for its subject matter as if it were a eulogy for a dying way of life. Which I suppose one could say is true actually. For iconic as the suburbs are, life certainly has been and still is changing there. "If I could have it all back, I'd love to waste all over again..."