Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Poor Arcade Fire. While colleagues like Animal Collective, Broken Social Scene, the Decemberists and Vampire Weekend have had to shoulder a certain amount of Responsibility for Indie Rock over the last few years, the bulk of the burden rests on the Montreal collective. What does it mean to be indie in 2010? Can music be inspiring and personally meaningful yet still reach a wide audience? Where does the notion of the album exist in these mp3-downloading times? Something something blogosphere? God, no wonder Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Tapes ‘n Tapes got the hell out before anyone cared too much.

See, Arcade Fire can't just turn up with a great record and expect that to be enough. They made the mistake of debuting with a genuine classic in 2004's Funeral, which was both startlingly original and fitting within a rich tradition of classic indie. The husband-and-wife creative axis of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne gave the band a patina of olde-worlde traditionalist charm, while the loose, collective nature of the band was as modern as tomorrow (especially in Canada: cf New Pornographers, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the aforementioned BSS). Music critics – including this one – went nuts for Funeral (and in our defence, have you any idea how rare and wonderful it is when an much-hyped album turns up and is actually as amazing as promised? It's like birthday-X-mas with the Easter Jesus) and started expecting miracles. That this was a mistake was made clear when they released their second album, 2007's Neon Bible, a good record hampered by an overblown sound and several tracks too many.

The latter problem is shared to an extent by The Suburbs but the production has been brought down a couple of notches, meaning that Butler and Chassange's voices are no longer battling with cascading pipe organs or masses of suffocating reverb. It means that Chassange can use her lower register to whispery effect (as on ‘Half Light I') and that Butler can modulate his delivery to sound confidently authoritative rather than desperately declamatory (compare the choruses of ‘City with No Children' with the strangulated howl of, say, ...Bible's ‘Black Mirror'). It's a small but important difference, and one that affects the arrangements and instrumentation of the songs.

The album starts strong with the jaunty, piano-based title track leading into the infectiously clanging guitar riff of lead single ‘Ready to Start', a song that's the equal of any of their barn-burners of old. And they're not afraid to use new sounds either: ‘Half Light II (No Celebration)' is driven by the sort of bubbling sequencer that used to power ZZ Top, and ‘Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)' is pure 80s synthpop complete with uplifting key change.

However, the newest thing is the vibe of the lyrics. If Funeral was their hopeful, hey-gang-let's-do-the-show-right-here record and Neon Bible was the we've-seen-the-world-and-its-terrible-truths-fight-the-power rabble-rousing disc, The Suburbs is infused with a resigned spirit of you-people-suck-and-what's-the-fucking-point. Actually, there's some evidence to suggest that it's just Arcade Fire fans that are pissing Butler off – how else to interpret "The kids are still standing with their arms folded tight" ('Month of May')? – although there seems to be a lot of doubt in the power and value of music creeping in there generally: on ‘Suburban War' he sighs, "The music divides/Us into tribes/You grew your hair so I grew mine."

Alternatively, given the band's leftish political leanings, maybe it's just a general evaporation of hope after the new dawn of Yes-We-Can turned into grim realities and Obama administration compromises: the narrator of ‘Half Light II' growls, "Pray to God that I won't see the death of everything that's wild," before a pointedly repeated coda of "One day they will see it's long gone". Or maybe they're just really fucking sick of people trying to read auguries in their lyrics and would like to be taken at face value for a while, thanks very much. In any case, The Suburbs is an intriguingly bleak third entry, whose mix of inventive arrangements and stick-in-the-head melodies should well bring new listeners on board. Of course, that should just piss Arcade Fire off even more. 

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