{"id":1446,"date":"2010-08-12T16:23:02","date_gmt":"2010-08-12T20:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=1446"},"modified":"2010-08-12T22:55:27","modified_gmt":"2010-08-13T02:55:27","slug":"arcade-fires-the-suburbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/12\/arcade-fires-the-suburbs\/","title":{"rendered":"Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs<\/i>."},"content":{"rendered":"

I wouldn’t have characterized myself as a huge Arcade Fire fan before last week \u2013 I’d heard several singles, liked most of them, but never ran out to download one of their albums or thought of them as one of my favorite artists. When Amazon.com ran a $3.99 promotion on mp3 downloads of their new album, The Suburbs<\/a>\"\"<\/i> (now $7.99), I bought it just on the assumption that there would be four or five songs worth having, more than justifying the cost. As it turns out, the album blew away my modest expectations, even with some unevenness, a 64-minute story of regret and frustrated hopes set to a pastiche of references and nods to new wave, post-punk, and alternative music from the 1980s.<\/p>\n

After an introductory track that sent me for the fast-forward button, \u201cReady to Start\u201d showed the Arcade Fire I know from their best prior singles, such as \u201cKeep the Car Running\u201d or \u201cNeighborhood #3 (Power Out),\u201d a foot-stomper with a driving bass line behind an understated vocal that mixes the yearning for an independent artistic life in a culture that seems (in Win Butler’s eyes) to reward the corporate life instead. \u201cEmpty Room\u201d starts with a crazy violin intro \u2013 which continues behind the wave of guitars, creating an effect that reminded me of My Bloody Valentine, but without the latter’s excessive distortion; both that song and \u201cMonth of May\u201d give the album its highest-energy moments to sustain the listener through the more subtle (and occasionally soporific) songs that dig more deeply into the decline of culture in the suburban sprawl.<\/p>\n

The slower-tempo tricks are more of a mixed bag, but offer the album’s best overall songwriting. \u201cHalf Light II (No Celebration)\u201d calls to mind New Order, or even Joy Division, with an anthemic lament with a lush arrangement behind dark, defeated vocals about the loss of nature and open space, while \u201cModern Man\u201d channels Roxy Music, although the latter’s cliched moaning about the people in line behind him \u201ccan’t understand\u201d typifies the song’s lack of concrete imagery.<\/p>\n

\u201cSprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)\u201d is the final full track (there’s a 90-second reprise of the opening song after it), and one of the most devastatingly complete songs on the record, building to a crescendo that never quite arrives while growing into a sprawling (pun intended) homage to the classic new wave\/synth-pop songs of the mid-1980s. I don’t care for Regine Chassagne’s voice, but her delivery of the song’s critique of the sprawl of the song’s title, that uniquely American creation of suburbs that go on forever, with \u201cdead shopping malls\u201d that \u201crise like mountains beyond mountains,\u201d bringing excesses of light (I keep picturing car dealerships at night, sucking down energy to light up football fields of metal boxes) but lacking the edginess or openness of urban culture.<\/p>\n

But the song I keep coming back to again and again is the spare, slightly uptempo yet haunting \u201cCity with No Children,\u201d the title line itself (\u201cFeel like I’ve been living in\/a city with no children in it\u201d) evoking images of deathly quiet, or even destruction \u2013 it brought to my mind the scene from The Road<\/i> where they see \u201cthe little boy\u201d in the window of a building in an otherwise abandoned city. The hand-claps stand in place of almost all typical percussion, while the predominant guitar riff is dampened, as if it was played through a pillow, creating a stunning contrast between the song’s pace and its melancholy production.<\/p>\n

The Suburbs<\/i> is far from a perfect album \u2013 there are too many \u201cskip\u201d tracks for me to slap an 80 on it, including the dirge-like \u201cWasted Hours,\u201d \u201cThe Suburbs,\u201d and \u201cSprawl I (Flatland),\u201d and the slow rocker \u201cRococo,\u201d with a staccato vocal line I just found irritating \u2013 but it’s far more than the standard three-singles-and-some-filler album template, a style that should be long dead in an era where the album is finally unbundled for consumers to purchase individual tracks. It’s the kind of album that would earn Grammy nominations if the Grammy Awards weren’t still based on wins, saves, and RBI.<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

Amazon.com has another 1000 albums available for $5 apiece as mp3 downloads through the end of the month. Two I’ll recommend: Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, which I reviewed (glowingly) back in April<\/a>; and Radiohead’s OK Computer<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, one of the five or ten best albums in the history of rock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wouldn’t have characterized myself as a huge Arcade Fire fan before last week \u2013 I’d heard several singles, liked most of them, but never ran out to download one of their albums or thought of them as one of my favorite artists. When Amazon.com ran a $3.99 promotion on mp3 downloads of their new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[359,161,852,357],"class_list":["post-1446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alternative","tag-highly-recommended","tag-music","tag-new-wave","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1449,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions\/1449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}