I can’t really pinpoint the moment when, nor can I definitively state the reason why I stopped taking Arcade Fire seriously.
Possibly: it had something to do with their proclivity for stating their case in the most theatrical way possible.
Probably: it had something to do with the fact that I’m kind of cynical and didn’t want to get my hopes too high.
Definitely: it had something to do with their very overrated, overcooked, and pedantic sophomore effort, Neon Bible.
But I don’t know when I reached the place where I found myself two weeks ago: a place where I actually scoffed at the prospect of another Arcade Fire. I had already relegated them to the bargain bin of my musical taste – the same general place as Julian Casablancas recently earned a spot, and the same place where Devendra Banhart has been forever.
I knew The Suburbs was going to be a shitty record. And there was a good amount of preliminary evidence to support my claim. First, its subject matter is a pretty clear return to the focus of the first album: the emotional crises of the most mundane corner of the developed world: our neighborhood. The whole record was so clear a reference to the “Neighborhood” songs that it smacked of a band late in its career trying to claw its way back to earlier triumphs after some ill-advised forays into sweeping, but ultimately stock, sociopolitical claims.
Then there was the length of the damn thing. I mean, for Christ’s sake, it’s over an hour long, with sixteen tracks. I conceived of that as an effort to throw a lot of shit and hope something stuck.
On the whole, I was pretty wrong about The Suburbs.
It’s an immersive, beautiful effort, as close to a return to Funeral form as anyone has any right or reason to hope for. The production is clean and revealing, evoking more Britt Daniel than David Byrne. “Modern Man” weds the fragile power of Win Butler’s voice with winsome, crisp guitars. The Suburbs doesn’t seek to recreate the symphonic intimacy of Funeral, nor to artificially expand it (like Neon Bible); rather, it redefines it, cleans it up. It doesn’t really sound like the band were thinking, “Hey, we need to top Funeral,” while recording this album (a feeling that permeated most of Neon Bible). They have expanded their range of influences beyond Talking Heads, liberally invoking such diverse source material as George Gershwin (on the title track) and Depeche Mode, like on “Half Light II (No Celebration)” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”.
On The Suburbs, the band still have their opinions, but they present them with more resignation, as though they’re just a little tired. As a result, they conflate – to magnificent effect – their political discontent with their social and personal malaise. On the wonderful “City With No Children”, Butler sighs, “Dreamt I drove home to Houston / on a highway that was underground. / There was no light that we could see / as we listened to the sound / of the engine failing.”
I will say that the album is perhaps a bit long. It’s tough, because I would have been reluctant to cut any of these songs. But more than an hour of music gets pretty exhausting, by any standards. Despite this, The Suburbs is a consistently engaging effort. Arcade Fire pull this off by keeping things stylistically fresh and generally more upbeat. This is a record where they draw from a much broader sonic pool, which, in the end, makes the whole thing much deeper.
Ultimately, I think my attitude was the product of a more general trend in music today where we are quick to turn on our favorite acts, where we almost prefer a band to go down in flames and fall from grace than to actually have a consistently successful career. Whatever the cause, this is the part where I have to try and save face and explain away my incorrect prediction about the future of this band. So I’ll say that Arcade Fire are back. But it’s unclear to me at this point whether they were really as gone as I thought they were.
8.6 / 10.0
There’s a group at every high school that would sit around at lunch engaged in ferocious arguments about the best Pink Floyd song, or about which album was really the fulcrum of Led Zeppelin’s career, or just raving about The Beatles. The members of this group inspired simultaneous envy and scorn from the outside world. Envy because they seemed so intimately connected and familiar with this bygone era, but scorn because their music knowledge had, somewhere along the line, morphed into blind prejudice (you know it as rock snobbery); they were incapable of appreciating anything that wasn’t released in the 60s or 70s.
I really fucking hate Bruce Springsteen. And I really don’t want to have this fight with you, but l think his rise to superstardom was the beginning of the end for music. It marked the real beginning of the era in which we have come to conflate marketability with musical talent. Bruce Springsteen looked like a rock star, so we believed he was one. If Bruce Springsteen looked like Seth Rogen, I promise you he would be in the bargain bin.
It’s been an unusually big couple of years for compilations with the words “dark” and “night” in the title; you might remember last year’s Dessner brothers-curated Dark Was the Night swept this publication off its proverbial feet. In 2010, super-producer Danger Mouse and the late Sparklehorse nucleus Mark Linkous present Dark Night of the Soul.
The whole supergroup thing has to be kind of inconvenient, in a way, right? Like, nobody’s happy if you just put out a good record. It has to be great. Super, even. A for instance: if Challengers had been the debut album from some unknown Montreal or Brooklyn band, that band would have been hailed as the second coming of Christ. But it was put out by the New Pornographers, and we all expect better from them. I mean, come on – they’ve got A.C. Newman, Neko Case, and Dan Bejar! They should be putting out ass-kickers, like every time.
Mike Hadreas is freaking me out. His debut album as Perfume Genius is one gloomy son of a bitch. I mean, it is out and out harrowing. Before I even get into whether I liked it or not, just know that it’s an emotional ordeal, and Hadreas never lets up with the simple daggers of self-loathing. And I don’t mean that in an endearing, quasi-humorous Frightened Rabbit kind of way. I mean it in a “Holy shit, I kind of want to slit my wrists after listening to this fucking record,” kind of way.
Menomena’s new record starts with an almost sterile mix of squeaky-clean ostinato Strat, crisp drums, plucky bass, and a kind of affable melody not found on their previous record. It’s, well, kinda, like, poppy. That is, the band wastes no time establishing the fact that they were not going to just put out another esoteric (genius) experimental folk piece like Friend and Foe. To be sure, Mines, their third record is by far their most deliberate, conventional, and sure, mature, effort yet. This is a proper rock record. These songs are not amorphous, but concrete pop works. There is none of the disconcerting production touches found on “Wet and Rusting”; the tracks rarely venture into the runny intensity of “Muscle ‘n Flo”.
In the early 2000s, the East Coast – primarily New York – was the engine of the music scene in the United States. New bands like Interpol and The Strokes were the key players in changing the direction of music. Now, a decade later, the West Coast seems to be having its day. Wherever bands come from, many incorporate into a beachy, wave-riding lo-fi, uniquely Californian flair – think Wavves, Real Estate, Surfer Blood, and even Local Natives, just to name a few.
We’ve all had our rock star fantasy. What separates us is how far we’ve taken it. Some people keep it confined to their shower, singing their hearts out to and putting on quite a show for invisible – but no less adoring – crowds. Others actually pick up a guitar and clumsily cover Dave Matthews and Jack Johnson songs in their dorm room to get laid by their pick of dewy-eyed girls in college. Still others write their own music, grow their hair out a little bit, and carry around a notebook where they “write their ideas as they come” in Sharpie or something. Then, there are the performers. The bravest, the most narcissistic of them all: they write their music and assemble people to execute their vision, and then they put themselves on the chopping block to be evaluated. Why? Because in these people, the dream burns the hottest. They want so badly to find themselves on the real stage, with the real crowd, that they will allow themselves to be cut down one hundred times just to get that one shot at the big leagues.
“You’ve got some charm, I must admit.”
