It has been about a month since the latest album from Arcade Fire was released. Since then "The Suburbs" has garnered heaps of critical praise, produced an innovative music video that was released online, and the album even hit number one on the Billboard 200. Not bad for a baroque pop outfit from Canada whose main concern is creating social commentary rather than hit singles.
What's most interesting about Arcade Fire's latest effort is that the album is unified around a central theme: growing up in suburban America. Lead singer Win Butler was raised outside of Houston and his childhood experience shines through the entire album. Some would say that this makes "The Suburbs" a concept album, that oft-used term to describe albums that are more than just randomly composed songs, completely independent of each other.
A concept album is one that uses some kind of motif to create a narrative throughout the entire piece. And though the concept album has been around for decades, commercial success is a seldom observed phenomenon for such efforts. The obvious exception is "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," which was immensely popular.
But often, concept albums get dismissed as inaccessible or eccentric. Take, for example, Neutral Milk Hotel's 1998 masterpiece "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea." The album is unified around World War II imagery and implicit references to the life of Anne Frank. While most critics absolutely ate up the concept, the album reached only a small audience at first. Recently the album has achieved cult status, but nothing near number one on the Billboard charts.
Concept albums are not a new endeavor for Arcade Fire. The band consistently critiques American society by using different themes on their albums. On "Neon Bible" religion was the motif of choice. This time, the band uses strip malls, monotonous subdivisions and suburban sprawl as their inspiration.
Physical spaces have always played an important role in Arcade Fire's lyrics. For example, "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)," the opening song of their first album, depicts adolescent life in a snow-covered, abandoned town. The description of space juxtaposed with familial strife (e.g. "If the snow buries my neighborhood, and if my parents are crying, then I'll dig a tunnel from my window to yours") conflate feelings of wonderment and nostalgia, which are two adjectives that adequately describe Arcade Fire's sound.
With "The Suburbs," Arcade Fire continue, the trend of using physical space in their lyrics. This time, however, they use suburbia to make a larger statement about American life and society. Their view of contemporary society is certainly not positive. Nor is it entirely negative. For example, on "Suburban War," Butler channels Springsteen to evoke feelings of nostalgic Americana: "In the suburbs I, I learned to drive/People told me we would never survive, so grab your mother's keys we leave tonight." Moments like these are plentiful throughout the album.
Even more plentiful, however, are the scathing critiques of suburban life. On "Wasted Hours," Butler sings, "First they built the road, then they built the town/That's why we're still driving round and round/And all we see are kids in buses longing to be free." How often is a bestselling record simultaneously a critique of car-centric urban planning efforts? Probably not often enough.
At the close of the album, the critique of suburbia soars to new heights. On "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)," an unusually dancey number for the song's lyrical content, Regine Chassagne croons, "Sometimes I wonder if the world is so small/that we can never get away from the sprawl/living in the sprawl/dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains." The sense of despair is contrasted with the song's uptempo beat and joyous melody.
This kind of dissonance makes the band's actual view of suburban life unclear. On one hand, they hate the banality and ugliness of the suburbs and cannot wait to escape from them. But on the other, there is a sense of nostalgia for a place that is intrinsically connected to childhood. What is absolutely clear, however, is that "The Suburbs" is a thought-provoking portrayal of the society to which we all belong. And the fact that the album was a bestseller can give us hope that there is a place for music like this in America.