The three year wait has ended and the often (rightly or wrongly) named ‘Greatest Band On Earth’ have delivered their third studio album, ‘The Suburbs’.
Before I get stuck into the album it’s important to know where this band has been. The band endured tragedy and thus named their stunning, 2005 debut ‘Funeral’. The album was critically acclaimed on release and consistently charts high in ‘Album of the Decade’ polls. They seemingly propelled themselves into the highest levels of the music stratosphere from the almost total unknown.
Where the critical reviews of the debut have held firm, the same isn’t quite as black and white for follow up album ‘Neon Bible’. With the second record released in 2007 to even more critical acclaim, the band really did seem unstoppable. But after time this seemed to wear thin, ‘Neon Bible’ felt like an album the band thought they needed to make and not an album they wanted to make, which brings us to ‘The Suburbs’.
This album is about Win and Will Butler’s youthful years growing up in the suburbs of Houston and it truly is an enthralling journey of happiness and sorrow. At the time of the album’s release the band themselves leaked to the internet two tracks from the record; ‘The Suburbs’ and ‘Month of May’. I must say on first listen I was slightly disappointed They didn’t have the scale we had come to expect from Arcade Fire, they felt like they could be the workings of any four piece band. But my early judgment was naive; when I put my headphones on to play this album for the first time I was really made to feel stupid for my previous thoughts.
You see, it’s about context, the songs on this album fit together as one, merge from one to another. This is not an album made for the constant release of singles and the hope of chart success. The album as a whole went to number one in the UK and the US due to its continuity. Not even the repeated use of song titles with brackets can annoy me here, because it feels right. With not one bad track on display, everyone is going to find something to please their ears.
In a music scene that seems to have become saturated by the synth over night, Arcade Fire have shown they can master it and use it to subtle perfection on tracks ‘Ready To Start’ and ‘Half Light II (No Celebration)’. Stand out tracks include; ‘Rococo’, which seems to describe overly pretentious and big headed adolescents using mediums that they don’t quite understand to describe their sizeable teenage anguish. ‘We Used To Wait’ is about the lack of patience in the modern world, where there used to be an excited anxiousness of waiting for a letter now there is the throw away, in-personal e-mail.
The album is perfectly brought to a close with ‘The Suburbs (continued)’, Win sings of how, if he could have had all the time given back to him from that time of his life, he wouldn’t change anything he’d done. Enjoy that time of your life and don’t regret anything you do. Through the good times and the bad, this is one of the most care free times of your life, before the subject matter of the previous two albums have taken affect upon your it.
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Where the critical reviews of the debut have held firm, the same isn’t quite as black and white for follow up album ‘Neon Bible’. With the second record released in 2007 to even more critical acclaim, the band really did seem unstoppable. But after time this seemed to wear thin, ‘Neon Bible’ felt like an album the band thought they needed to make and not an album they wanted to make, which brings us to ‘The Suburbs’.
