After weeks of gloom and misery, your favourite segment returns! Yay! Aren't you happy? Of course you are. We continue the Arcade Fire album review, and from this point on things get really interesting. No, really. I promise.
Who : Arcade Fire
Album name : The Suburbs
Formed : 2001
From : Montreal, Canada
What do they play : Indie rock / chamber pop / art rock / baroque pop / symphonic rock (at least according to Wikipedia)
Release date : August 03 2010.
There's a lot to unpack here, and I mean A LOT. First, let me start by saying that I don't even recall listening to this album when it first came out, though I probably did maybe the once. The release date being August 2010 means that it came out during the death throes of my relationship with Silvia, and everything about it consumed me. 2010 was not a good year for me, and though I'm certain I listened to a lot of music that year, I wouldn't be able to tell you one single album I may have listened to. Whatever it may have been, things just didn't register with me back then. I wasn't emotionally and mentally capable of dealing with anything else. My mind could deal with the impending doom that faced us, it was all but written, but we still clung on to some vain hope that somehow, somehow we could salvage what we had. We couldn't, as I illustrated months ago, and as such this album came and went, mostly passed me by, and though I loved 'Ready to start', I loathed 'We used to wait', a song that I have since come to adore. But mostly, I just ignored this record. Call it a casualty of that time, call it what you will, it's time with me still hadn't come. And yet, that said... this is - by far - my desert island Arcade Fire record. The question is how did it become that important? Well, for that we gave to fast forward to... was it 2015 when I dated Sonia? I guess it was. The very first time we went on holiday together Christmas that year, we ended up in a bar that was packed with people, and they were talking loudly, but I could hear familiar music in the background. I recognized some of the songs, and those I wasn't yet familiar with seemed to strike a chord with me. I guess they must have been playing the record on repeat, because during our stay there it played a few more times. I was entranced, and was absolutely dying to listen to it with the proper attention it deserved, nay, demanded! But I wouldn't be able to do so straight away - no, dear Sonia didn't listen to anything but metal, so me suggesting to her we listen to this record was completely out of the question.
What I do know is that I spent most of 2016 listening to it. It was my go-to record to listen at work. I listened to it non-stop, studying it, learning it, playing and replaying it, over and over again. It was then that the album clicked with me and I finally got it. I've always been a proponent of the idea that the band plays music that somehow evokes nostalgia of things you didn't necessarily experience. I grew up in the suburbs, bu not suburbs like these. Maybe some things in common with them, maybe some experiences are the same everywhere. What I do know is that listening to this record made me feel - truly feel - like I was living in those suburbs. And lyrically it really struck a nerve with me - there are recurring, repeating patterns in the lyrics that really help to illustrate and build the narrative. For the most part, I'd say that most - not all, but most - of the songs here have at least one line that whenever I listen to it, it just stops me dead on my tracks. I'm a sucker for well written, poignant lyrics, something that I really value a lot, and when I come across poetry such as can be found here, my soul soars. And musically this album is just great, it's got very diverse songs - including the first real inkling of what would be coming in the future with further use of electronics - there are some epic songs, grandiose and majestic. Well, for me at least. Songs like 'Empty Room', 'Half Light I' and both 'Sprawl I' and 'Sprawl II' speak directly to my soul.
But is is a perfect album? Well, no. There are at least a couple of songs that I don't really care about, and whose exclusion would make for an even better album for me. Maybe even three songs, though one of them - 'Modern man' - I have come to not mind very much. But 'Rococo' and 'Month of May' are clunkers to my ears, and though I never skip them, they're songs that I'll never really like, I think. But the upside of it is that there is a deluxe version of the album, which has a couple of extra tracks - 'Culture war' and 'Speaking in tongues', which are mostly on a par with the best songs on the record, and that should by rights have taken the place of those clunkers, and - best of all - it includes the extended version of (very likely) my favourite track from the album - 'Wasted hours', here with the subtitle (A life we can live). Still... if I had to choose an Arcade Fire to listen to until the end of time, it's this one. Possibly. Probably. Because from now on... I'm not entirely well versed on their discography.
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