Album review: The Suburbs, Arcade Fire

Published on Friday 30 July 2010 11:46

ARCADE FIRE: THE SUBURBS UNIVERSAL, £13.99 * * * *

AS YOU feel your way into this, Arcade Fire's eagerly-awaited third album, the ideas suggested by its identically-titled first single are gradually borne out. Over the course of the first few songs it feels like the record is detailing the band's post-fame hangover and songwriter Win Butler's early midlife crisis all at once.

The song The Suburbs, which opens and closes the record in different versions, is languid and half-paced, starkly so in comparison to the bursts of frantic, passionate energy of which this group are so brilliantly capable. It's not a bad song, sounding much like a bitter cousin to Neil Young's Harvest Moon, but the feeling of exhaustion and disenchantment running through it might have you worried for the rest of the record.

Lyrically Butler pines for a daughter so he can "show her some beauty before the damage is done" (to the world itself, or just her own innocence?), and the sense of ennui as critical acclaim and public adoration slam up against the concerns of a regular suburban existence is rich and soul-sapping. "We're still screaming," he gasps at the end of the song, but frankly he sounds too exhausted to even try.

This impression doesn't fade quickly. In fact it only builds over the next three tracks, guitar-heavy songs wrapped in a similarly dissatisfied air and featuring only Butler's vocal. "All the kids have always known the emperor wears no clothes," he intones wearily on the ill-named Ready to Start, "but they bow down to him anyway / it's better than being alone."

The transience of his fame seems to be weighing heavy, and perhaps also the feeling that he's some kind of false idol. The markedly more bitter Rococo has him rail against "modern kids", who use "big words that they don't understand" and "build it up just to burn it back down." At one point he whines "Oh my dear God, what is that horrible song they're singing?" It's almost parodic, as if he were rock's Victor Meldrew at all of 30 years old, but the feeling is that Butler neither needs nor wants the approval of fresh-faced tastemakers. In this sense, the song is a pastoral cousin to LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge.

In truth, none of this, as revealing as it might be, amounts to vintage Arcade Fire. Thank heavens, then, for Butler's wife Regine Chassagne, who enters the album a full quarter of the way in alongside the hurtle of strings and the pound of drums on Empty Room. She's like a breath of fresh air after Butler's moping, offering a metaphorical kick up the backside with her brisk, hopeful, utterly charming vocal. She sounds like Kate Bush, although the meaning of her lyrics is largely obscured by the volume of the music.

This is more like it, and does amount to vintage Arcade Fire. Butler seems reinvigorated too, and his cynicism at least comes attached to a grinding guitar signature and the sound of real passion in his voice on City With No Children. Is he still in character from the first song and mourning childlessness, or fantasising about a world with no pesky modern kids? It's unclear, but this has all the spirit of mid-period Springsteen with a touch of reserve where the bombast should be.

By the album's midway point, Suburban War, we're back to Butler's slowed-down introspection, but it's taken time to crystallise and gain focus by now. The suburbs he keeps returning to have been with him all his life, and he reminisces of a place where "the music divides us into tribes" while commiserating that "all my old friends, they don't know me now".

This tension between past, present and future is at the album's heart. If the passions of Butler's youth have dimmed, what will his current experiences seem like to him in the future? Or, as he succinctly has it during We Used to Wait, "now our lives are changing fast / into something pure at last / hope that something pure can last."

He addresses these fears with flights of nostalgia (Month of May is a punk rock reflection of The Clash or The Sex Pistols), a couple of tracks whose absence might not be missed from what is a long album (Deep Blue is particularly forgettable) and two twin-song suites in Half Light I & II and Sprawl I & II which show off the wonderfully duality of a band which can call upon such shining and diverse talents as Butler and Chassagne to front them.

This is an album with lots of questions and just enough answers, a lack of certainty about itself at first followed by bursts of confidence.