Review Summary: Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
It’s easy to criticize a review which obsesses over the broader context of a release rather than the sound and the songs. No matter how much societal or historical relevance an album has, without the music, who would care to read about it? With that being said, for a retrospective review, I find a focus on non-musical factors to be far more defensible. Of course a record must’ve acquired some sort of significance for a writer (in this case, me) to take the time to look back at it. In this case,
The Suburbs serves as an interesting lens to look at a range of subjects: the history of indie music, the unsettled national mood in America, and, of course, everyone’s favorite topic, the flagging trajectory of Arcade Fire’s career. As such, get ready for a whole bunch of navel-gazing intermingled with a few tacit acknowledgements of some great tunes.
I got into music very late, only beginning to get beyond occasionally listening to The Beatles and the like late in high school, which proceeded into a full-blown listening obsession during my college years. I just turned thirty, so that puts the 2010 release date of
The Suburbs in a sweet spot (you didn’t think there’d be a math section, did you?). While I didn’t actually listen to this album upon release, it was nigh-impossible not to be aware of its existence and the encircling hype from the beginning, and when I did check it out sometime in the 2011/2012 time frame, it served as an immediate gateway into the wide and wonderful world of indie music of all stripes.
All this personal detail may be excessive, but the above puts me in good company.
The Suburbs is a milestone release, as falling in love with it served as a sort of rite of passage for a certain kind of indie-curious American kid of a certain age. Indeed, it didn’t even matter that I didn’t grow up in the suburbs, but rather a rural small town, that great American trope. Fear not, though, for Arcade Fire, “the suburbs” as a concept serves as a stand-in for this post-modern era of America as a whole, in all its beauty and its decadence. Even if suburban life, taken precisely, was alien to me, I still felt the power of the vision on display.
In a lot of ways,
The Suburbs also marked the high water mark of indie music, commercially and culturally. At the end of a decade in which the genre had burst into greater prominence than ever before,
The Suburbs was a scintillating success not just artistically, but by metrics overtly disavowed by hipsterdom: among other things, hitting #1 on the Billboard charts, and winning a Grammy. While such feats would be achieved again by indie-associated artists in the future, you’d be hard-pressed to identify a later album which managed to accommodate both such high musical quality and such widespread buzz in a single package.
But if
The Suburbs serves as an artifact perfectly representing a particular moment in musical history in one sense, in another we’re all still living the world the album creates. When the ever more frequent predictions of impending civil strife engulfing the US come up, well, that’s all foretold in the half-surrealism of “Suburban War”. The ruinous impacts of technology on politics and mental health? “Deep Blue” has your back. Getting apocalyptic vibes from endless news about natural disasters and climate change? Just listen to “Half Light II (No Celebration)”. Through the whole album runs a common thread: a search for meaning and belonging, a struggle against an existence which, while comfortable, is inherently cookie-cutter and, at its core, unnatural and fake. “We were already bored”, Win Butler sings on the irresistible title track, seemingly at odds with the grimly bleak outlook of the lyrics, but it’s this very existential boredom which seems to power today’s headlines of a nation seemingly bent on tearing itself apart and vast numbers of fellow citizens drawn never-endingly into a conspiracy theory rabbit hole (plastic sole, yeah).
It’s important to acknowledge that the last paragraph might give Arcade Fire a little too much credit. After all, even at their best (and they’re pretty close to that here), this is a band which aims for the grandiose. Their themes are almost always broad in scope, never getting bogged down in specifics. As such, the discerning listener is free to intuit any more particular meaning they want from a line, a song, an album. What I’m suggesting is that, if the intervening decade had gone in a different direction, I might still be opining about how predictive
The Suburbs was. Nonetheless, the album just works, a grand vision executed with undeniable talent and passion, with only a few untrimmed pieces of fat around the edges which prevent perfection. There’s something poetic about this, though, like Arcade Fire’s success contained the seeds of their own destruction, or something like that, as It’s this very tendency which has, on more recent releases, gotten the band a lot of criticism. Those complaints about smarmy corporate messages intended to ingratiate the band with rebellious teens and disillusioned young professionals, at their root, critique this same font of lyricism, the band’s natural intent to make the broadest possible statement in the grandest possible way. Those dismissals of the latest material are at least somewhat justified, but the difference on
The Suburbs is that the band still feels consistently invested in what they were going on about. The result is a monumental record which somehow captures the essence of a time and a place.
The Suburbs neither excoriates or celebrates, it simply portrays. All the better.
While the mellowly-catchy “Wasted Hours” may not be the most obvious song on this record to discuss as a conclusion, its narrative has always appealed deeply to me since my first listen, and only grown more potent with time: the sense of nostalgia for something lost, even if the thing in question is openly acknowledged to have never been that great anyway. That’s the feeling which I get from
The Suburbs as a whole these days. After all, “we’re still kids in buses, longing to be free”.
