Music Review: Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs”

Rating: 90

Artists who grew up in subdivisions often live uncomfortably with warring feelings of love and disdain for the old neighborhood, that place of uniformity that, like it or not, made them who they are. Win Butler grew up in The Woodlands, an affluent suburb on the northern reaches of Houston’s great sprawl, so he lives with the conflict and now projects it in Arcade Fire’s ambitious and beautiful new album, “The Suburbs.”

The opening title track begins with Butler recounting a hazy dream of running through yards and screaming “when all of the walls that they built in the ‘70s finally fall, and all the houses they built in the ‘70s finally fall.” These are songs with connective tissue and common refrains, in which the characters try to escape physically or emotionally, becoming pretentious downtowners in “Rococo” or conforming into a jaded mass “with their arms folded tight” in the glorious art-punk anthem “Month of May.”

While “The Suburbs” will speak to people who grew up in similar surroundings, it is especially resonant to those of us who spent at least part of our childhoods in Houston, a place that experienced some of the sharpest growth of any metropolitan area in the years leading up to 1980, the year Butler was born. The city developed like billowing concentric clouds of carpentry and masonry in the 1970s: “This town’s so strange, they built it to change, and while we are sleeping the streets they re-arrange,” Butler sings on “Suburban War.” My standard joke about the streets in Houston is that the city planners dumped a bowl of spaghetti on a table and traced the mess to create the map. Butler isn’t there anymore, but like any Houston kid, he was deeply informed by a place where one year’s bright, sparkling new neighborhood was the next year’s dumpy tract of worn-out lumber and bricks, with the first residents decamped to Sugarland or Conroe or beyond. We love Houston, we love it not, and Butler’s still pulling the petals off the dandelion he plucked from the vacant lot.

Musically, the seven-piece attacks these songs with balanced power and grace. While Butler is the conceptual king of “The Suburbs,” the tracks sung by Regine Chassagne are among the most instantly engaging, especially the roaring “Empty Room,” featuring Sarah Neufeld’s feverish violin work and the penultimate “Sprawl 2,” where Chassagne sings of alienation in a place where “dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains.” Butler now lives in Montreal, a city where people walk. But Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” proves that he still carries both stark and fond memories of a place where people drive at a crawl through the sprawl, a few feet at a time down the freeway to that house built in the ‘70s that, in his mind’s eye, has yet to fall.
– Lang

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