Album review: Arcade Fire, 'The Suburbs'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
Memory, childhood, home. These are big subjects that have obsessed novelists, movie makers, playwrights and songwriters for decades, if not centuries. Now the Arcade Fire, a band not known for thinking small, tackles them all in its third studio album, “The Suburbs” (Merge).
When the Arcade Fire burst into sudden prominence in 2004 with its rousing debut album, “Funeral,” a process accelerated by the kind of viral enthusiasm normally reserved for Paris Hilton home movies and Kanye West tweets, the excitement was tempered by one nagging doubt: Was this just another built-to-implode Internet flash?
But the Montreal septet has now proven its staying power, making three very different albums in a span of six years. Whereas “Funeral” inspired shout-from-the-rafters sing-alongs, a blast of live-for-the-moment resolve at a time of mourning, “Neon Bible” (2007) was ominous and claustrophobic, a skeptical look at an era that conflates religion, war and consumerism. If “Funeral” was about having faith in each other, “Neon Bible” was about losing faith in the institutions that try to manage our lives.
The title song that opens “The Suburbs” signals another thematic and sonic shift. It’s lighter than anything Arcade Fire has done in the past, with its bouncy piano and skip-along beat, an invitation into an album that seems to expand as it progresses, not unlike the sprawling communities it describes. The song’s jauntiness melts into a mass of ghost-like voices and the tone shifts to something more evanescent. The narrator recalls the expectations and dreams he once had as a child and questions whether he has lived up to them.
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