The fundamental risk of writing a broad, expansive, literary concept album – think Pink Floyd’s The Wall or Rush’s 2112 – is that an band opens itself up to two layers of critique instead of just one. On the one hand, you have the record’s medium itself, the musical vehicle that drives the album’s many interlocking themes and motifs; notes, measures, songs, constructed rhythms, the instant gratification of the music itself. But on the other hand, there is the album’s literary and textual significance: the narrative of the beast, how well those motifs are assembled, the ebb and flow of the story. And while it’s certainly possible for a non-concept album to have an overall theme to it – if anything, it’s recommended – there is a distinct difference between composing an album about the abstract concept of growing up and writing one in which growing up is very intricately and specifically woven into a larger chronicle of boredom, loss, nightmare, and introspection.

And such is the basic problem with Arcade Fire’s immensely anticipated new LP, The Suburbs, an epic, 16-track voyage into the depths of front man Win Butler’s complex relationships with his place of birth and frustrated adolescence. Were it to be held up as a purely musical artifact and stripped of all conceptual significance, it would be an immediate classic, a multifaceted, chameleonlike glimpse into the influences and abilities of the most famous indie rock band in the world. But because of its near-mythical density, it cannot be judged as an album alone.

The Suburbs is a concept album to its core (like The Wall, it even hints at a repeating loop), to the point where it often feels more like an opera or a novel than pop music. It opens with an overture, and features deeply texturized lyrical themes (a variety of phrases are repeated from song to song), a definite narrative, and a recurring motif of call-and-response song structures (“Sprawl” I and II, “Half Light” I and II, “Modern Man”/“Rococo”) that give the album a flashback quality, as if its narrator were speaking from a present that was fully engaged with, and commenting on, his own past. Vaguely autobiographical (the album makes direct reference to Houston, Texas, where Win and William Butler were raised), The Suburbs seems to ultimately be Butler’s attempt to grapple with a childhood he once reviled but has since come to terms with, much to his own surprise.

It is to the album’s credit that Butler does not set down firmly on one side of the fence or the other about his suburban upbringing – had the album been solely composed of a variety of tracks that extrapolate on the many similarly simplistic ways in which the suburbs are boring, it would have been an immediately dismissible slog. Fortunately, each track that derides the suburban experience (and there are many) features an equally forceful response – that the city is no better than the suburbs, and twice as unauthentic – that in the end seem to combine to reach the conclusion that, really, it’s all the same.

But the album offers little explanation as to why Butler is suddenly reexamining his upbringing. What seems to be indicated is some sort of apocalyptic war – bombs are a common motif, and “Half Light II” appears to directly indicate that San Francisco has been exterminated – but The Suburbs spends so little time on explaining Butler’s newfound nostalgia and so much on repeatedly elucidating to the listener the same ideas, sometimes mere minutes apart (“Modern Man” and “Wasted Hours” are at heart the same song), that the narrative thread becomes frightfully thin, and ultimately meaningless.

It’s difficult to tell whether The Suburbs would have been better off eschewing its ambiguous post-apocalyptic setting or becoming more involved with it; if Butler discards his apocalypse entirely, the album collapses into an endless spiral of repeating motifs and phrases, but if he expands on it, the album potentially erupts into a runaway, bloated mess. What’s left is a frustratingly incomplete core of unconnected ideas that yield a veritable garden of promise – but disappointingly little else – that can at least be commended for thinking big, even if they falls short of an immeasurably lofty promise.

But where the album fails as a literary text, it is transcendent as a musical work. Eschewing the toweringly ominous, religious reverb that drenched Neon Bible, The Suburbs is an amalgamation of numerous genres of music – the clean, whimsical Bowie pop of its title track, the Radiohead clatter of “Month of May,” the baroque Police-esque rock of “Modern Man,” and the delightful new wave of “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” the best track on the album and one of the highlights of Arcade Fire’s oeuvre – that as a whole reflect the cultural construction of an identity that so vehemently rejected the boredom and conformity of a suburban upbringing. It is easily the band’s most musically self-aware work, a top-to-bottom collection of breathtakingly diverse anthems; but it never feels like anything but an Arcade Fire record, even as it stretches into places the group had never yet dared go.

The Suburbs is a beautiful-sounding record, a hell of a nice try, and in the end a rather poignant elegy for the shrinking, dying American suburbs. Americans are moving back into the city at a record pace as the pastoral picture of white-fenced, dog-in-the-yard, two-and-a-half-kids home ownership that we’ve lived with since the end of the Second World War is being very forcefully replaced by one of industry, bustle, and high-rise apartments, and I suppose it’s worth something that at least one band pines for a landscape in which “dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains” and where quiet, dutiful policemen vainly and quaintly patrol the darkening streets of the dying dream to which they hold so fast. While not as good as either Funeral or Neon Bible, it nonetheless holds its own in one of the most staggeringly impressive years for music in recent memory.