Review: Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Music critics can be fickle mistresses. Follow up a good debut album with a great sophomore effort and you can be heaped with praise, however undeserved, for the rest of your career. Do it the other way around, however, and you're cast off as one-hit wonders, also-rans, who can never hope to hit such peaks again. Herein lies the current predicament for the Arcade Fire. Of course, it doesn't help matters when you introduce your third album to the world with an uncharacteristically low-key effort (the sombre title track), all of which meant that the hype and level of expectation were not all they might have been.

Yet against these odds, the Arcade Fire have seriously delivered the goods with The Suburbs. At 16 tracks and 65 minutes, The Suburbs threatens to be a sprawl (it even has a multi-part song entitled Sprawl), but the even pacing and consistent theming of the tracks actually makes it the band's most focussed record to date.

Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels), the opening track from Funeral, depicted kids digging tunnels through the snow to escape their parents. The kids in The Suburbs are no different - "grab your mother's keys, we're leaving" Win Butler tells us on the opening track - and the BIG themes that bore so heavy on the shoulders of Neon Bible are of no concern to the inhabitants here ("when the first bombs fell/we were already bored"). The return to more personable matters is a most welcome one, and whilst the concept of disillusioned kids living out their repetitive, sterile lives in modern suburbia is hardly an original one, it is at least carried out whole-heartedly and coherently, with multi-part songs, and the repetition of key themes and lyrics.

What takes a bit of getting used to is the lack of bombast - on the first few listens at least, this really needs to be regarded as a very separate entity to its predecessors in order to be judged objectively. More driven songs like Month of May and Empty Room are the rare exceptions to an album which predominantly plays out in mid-tempo. But despite the more stately nature of the material, the songs are richly detailed, and when the band takes a song to a rousing conclusion, as on Suburban War and We Used To Wait, the indulgence feels well earned.

A few forays into new-wave might have been disastrous, but actually produce the album's glittering highlight on the Regine-led Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), a Blondie-like gem that will surely go down a storm live. A few more obvious highlights wouldn't have done the album any harm, but The Suburbs succeeds in being greater than the sum of its parts, the archetypal grower. Most crucially, in executing this change in direction so well, they've proven that they are in it for the long haul, that they can and will remain one of the great bands in recent times.

The Suburbs closes with a reprise of the title track, in which Win Butler tells us "If I could have it back/all the time that we wasted/I'd only waste it again". For all their frustrations at their insular existence, the kids in The Suburbs lack both the ambition and imagination to do things any differently. For the Arcade Fire, thankfully, that's not the case.

86/100