Arcade Fire
The Suburbs
Merge
August 3
By Jason Cunningham
It’s hard to be the man with the microphone, but the Arcade Fire’s Win Butler does so with grace. In their third album, The Suburbs, Butler and team craft an elegant pop odyssey with a fierce political charge. The Suburbs, released Aug. 3 in North America, cries out to their fan base with unrelenting attention and grief. Within this grief is an array of complexities, ranging from the struggles of suburban families trapped within a shadowy and roguish system to the pain of those slipping into the lower class as an effect of it.
The suburbs that the album portrays can’t reject the world built for those at the top of the social hierarchy, so it must fight it with songs clutching to its empty dreams. The Suburbs’ depictions of neighborhoods where dead shopping malls are commonplace and prescriptions of abating our reliance on technology may leave a bitter taste in your mouth, but you’ll find your foot still tapping anyway.
The Arcade Fire do lay their sense of melancholy on a little thick at points in songs like “Wasted Hours” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” but fortunately this heaviness is mellowed by Butler’s tone of honesty and wife Régine Chassagne’s infectious vocals. Yes, the times are changing at blistering speeds and the band’s ability to capture that intensity is impressive and moving, but the painful preachiness of The Suburbs does become a weakness. The cause is sincere, but as each whack on the head comes to leave a bump, the seriousness of it all begins to wear thin.
The Suburbs aims at identifying the issues of suburban life and exposing their bellies, but that aim misses the mark at points where the album drags along. While it’s admirable to stress the importance of the joy found in showing good art patience, the 16 tracks on The Suburbs nearly pushes towards overkill. The messages of The Suburbs are as lucid and charming as the music backing them up, but trimming down a few tracks would’ve elevated this album from a great third LP to an indisputable masterpiece.
