The Top Albums of 2010: # 20

Arcade Fire
The Suburbs

The Arcade Fire really want to make an album like OK Computer. Not in the same way that Coldplay does, that way where they just stole from the album’s B-sides until they had a hit and then paid Brian Eno an enormous amount of money to pretend he worked on their albums while he was writing out his TED lectures, ranting about Israel, and doing Goon Show routines with David Bowie over the phone. No, Arcade Fire really think they have that caliber of album in them, and the truth is, they really don’t.

That's probably a good thing. Radiohead had a wider field of reference and Thom Yorke has a much more idiosyncratic and personal take on lyrics than Win Butler ever will. But it still remains, that The Suburbs is an attempt at making a somewhat science fictional concept album about Important Weighty Issues, and in interviews with the band they always drop Radiohead and Bjork references as if they think Yorke and Bjork are sitting around an iMac reading Arcade Fire interviews and going "I knew it!". This isn’t a band with a strong depth of musical knowledge - they like OK Computer and Homegenic. The less funky/noisy sides of Bowie, Springsteen, Talking Heads, the Clash, Cocteau Twins, Sonic Youth, Broken Social Scene, and uh? That’s about it. They’re never going to be a band who gets into a Can phase, or makes a sly Sun Ra reference. When Sasha Frere Jones went on his whole “there’s no black music in the Arcade Fire’s sound” tirade a few years ago there was a truth in there, buried beneath a shitty argument. You don’t listen to The Suburbs to get down. Because you can’t.

Then why is The Suburbs worth caring about? The themes here are - well, it’s an Arcade Fire record so “modernity” and “guilt” are a given. The past decade or so of scifi concept albums have been concerned with violence, psychosis, extremes - OK Computer and Kid A (arguably Radiohead’s whole output), Janelle Monae’s Metropolis Suite and ArchAndroid, Year Zero, Deltron 3030, Plastic Beach, Midnite Vultures  - each of those records use the conceit of “the future” to get at those extremes in the present. The Suburbs shares a ton of thematic ground with them - globalization, fear, isolation, alienation, grand statements about the way the world is headed. This is the kind of album that is always going to be at least a little moralistic, usually for the better - who gives a shit about scifi without an argument behind it? And calling The Suburbs scifi is actually a bit of a stretch. When Win Butler writes about “the Sprawl” I get the feeling he’s referencing Daydream Nation, not William Gibson. It's a conceit for him to talk about a) the less interesting aspect of the album which is the move of the narrator out of the suburbs into the sprawl and songs about being in a band that’s clearly autobiographical (the lyric “The kids are still standing with their arms folded tight” on “Month of May” is like nails on a chalkboard); and b) a position to start talking about a future where affect is completely wiped away, which interests me infinitely more. The best songs here are about that loss - a difficulty articulating emotions, bored responses to reprehensible violence, confusion, anxiety, impatience - and ultimately, guilt for feeling all of those things. (Half the songs mention not being able to sleep.) This is the side of the record that's interesting. Because for all the clunker lyrics, pretension, and mannered sensibilities, these are sincere worries being articulated well. For every grand gesture that lands like a brick (outright saying “the emotions are dead, it’s no wonder why you feel so strange” maybe wasn’t the best idea), there are moments of stark observation (as we listened to the sound of the engine failing), or of music that gets to the same place the lyrics do (“Empty Room” just soars, whatever’s being sung is barely registered). “We Used To Wait” could be the kind of lecturing nostalgia that indie rock does way too often, and at times but crystallizes exactly the feeling of a 3 in the morning gut-check, realizing that you’ve sat and refreshed your email dozens of times in the last hour for no reason other than compulsion. Of reading The Road at a similar moment another night and realizing that if this happened you’ve eroded all your skills without even realizing it. Of the uselessness of writing a letter just to write a letter just to prove a point. “I used to wait for it, I used to wait for it, and now I’m screaming sing the chorus again”, is how the song ends, frustrated that there is no easy back-to-basics solution to the way your own behavior has changed, how everyone’s behavior has changed, without anyone noticing. The problem is noticing too late, and catching on that any criticism you could level at the world around you could work for you too. You can’t dance to that sentiment, but then again who would want to?

-Sean Witzke, 2010

Comments

[Tim O'Neil]

Yeah, I've always thought the Arcade Fire were pretty one-note - which is something that Frere-Jones gets at too, albeit in his usual vaguely incoherent fashion. They hit so hard back in the day because even if they have only one or two tricks, they do those two tricks really well. If you were just a couple years too early to have heard The Soft Bulletin (or any number of earlier references), I guess Funeral would hit you like a ton of bricks.

I don't even dislike them: I think Neon Bible is a damn fine record, better than Funeral even. But that doesn't change the fact that they have but one register, and they can't move out of that register to save their lives. The worst part is that they probably think they are doing just that, even though The Suburbs is really just too long by half and really same-y. I don't think I've made it through the whole thing more than once - that's The Sprawl right there.

[Abhay]

I like Arcade Fire, but I'm with Tim re: Suburbs as being too long and same-y. There are a couple highpoints but long, long waits to get to them because all of the songs are 5-6 minutes. I think the problem is the first four songs, which really blend together for me-- the second half seems stronger but I'm usually pretty tuned by that point. Or... even on the second half, I liked the single fine for a single (City with No Children was the single, right?), but the song after that was the low-point of the album for me-- Half Light? Nooooo, Half Light. No!