It’s tough on expectations when your first album is named second-best album of the decade by Pitchfork, the nation’s preeminent indie tastemaker. When you know a band’s potential, it makes what falls short that much more disappointing. Arcade Fire’s new release “The Suburbs” has bright spots, featuring one of the best songs of the year and some monumental lyrical swells. Nonetheless, its songs are swallowed by emotional distance, even as they try to whisper in your ear and breathe down your neck. Much like its namesake, the music on “The Suburbs” is generally homogenized and unexciting.
The lagging first half of “The Suburbs” is almost boring enough to seem like a conscious creative choice, lulling the listener into a sensation of static existence. Songs like “Empty Room” retain pleasingly squiggly baroque string lines, while “City With No Children” churns away like a road song with a failing engine — catchy in a car commercial kind of way. Meanwhile, many of the lyrics imply a struggle with fame and expectations, along with plenty of self-mockery (see the audience-baiting meta-joke “Rococo”).
A wider view of the record, however, shows Win Butler straining to write his Springsteen opus about adolescent love, life and growing up in the strange suburban jungle. So many teenagers across America probably share Butler’s feelings of guilt and persecution, the sense that any other lifestyle would be more “real” than a suburban existence. It’s an adolescent obsession — never wanting to turn into one of “them,” whoever “they” might be. Eventually, this facade fades, and on “City With No Children,” Butler is left musing, “I used to think I was not like them. But I’m beginning to have my doubts about it.”
Under the ping-ponging bass, insistent military drums and U2-like jangle of the powerful “Half Light II,” Butler vows “I will never raise my voice.” It’s a lonely and torturous surrender. By tightening the theme of suburban discontent around seemingly every other line of the lyrics, the music is left to loop around the fringes, trilling and pounding away to no avail. Synth lines are cloyingly generic and brass explosions are kept in check despite the presence of so many crescendos begging for catharsis.
Still, the vocal interplay between Butler and wife/multi-instrumentalist Regine Chassagne remains fascinating; they are two youths, one with a cracked shell and the other resiliently wide-eyed. In “Sprawl (Flatland),” Butler bemoans the loneliest day of his life, when he searched every corner of the earth for “the real” and came up empty. It’s a gloomy, string-laden suicide note for childlike idealism.
Yet in the phenomenal ecstasy of “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” Chassagne has an irrepressible yearning to escape. Car alarms and squealing New Order synths exhort her onward and upward toward the invisible summit, losing oxygen along the way but thirsting for escape into the unknown darkness of the clouds. It’s one of Arcade Fire’s best songs, a confirmation that we can make the best of what this world has to offer after an album of doom and gloom.
To me, “The Suburbs” kept conjuring memories of the closing scene in “The Virgin Suicides.” In the movie, teenage boys who have spent their whole lives pining for the love of sheltered sisters finally think they are getting the chance to run away together. Instead, when the culmination of their desire is so close, the boys bear witness to the girls’ deaths. “The Suburbs” is the carefully curated playlist made by those who know exactly what they want to hear during their escape on the open road, even though the tape never makes it to the car.