Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” has become to the hipster what the peace sign and free love was to their predecessors, the hippy. In order to be a legit member of the fully developed indie club, you have to have it.
The band cooked up this feast of an album with the perfect recipe. They adopt a new vibe, deterring pitchfork-bearing critics from turning up their noses. At the same time, they savor all their previous epic attributes: clapping hands, background voices that call out in echoing strains, rhythms saturated with synthesized vibes and Regine Chassagne’s high, desperate sounding voice.
Songs like The Sprawl I (flatlands) are what make this band’s sound heroic. It’s the kind of music that should be placed at the climax of whatever this year’s Best Picture is; as the protagonist walks away from a lover the audience has rooted for throughout the film.
Listeners will absorb every colossal emotion the married duo felt as they configured their third, and possibly most enlightened album.
While 2005’s “Funeral” and 2008’s “Neon Bible” shared the tagline “We were kids once, and the world was incredible,” the album renders a deeper message, that kids are not truly living as kids once did. While this thought is not a novel one, it is relevant. “The Suburbs” becomes more than just an album, but a throwing down of the gauntlet (or game system) to kids everywhere.
The best of these challenges finds itself rooted in the album’s finest track, City With No Children In It.
Rococo even takes a stab at Arcade Fire’s own hipster listening culture, putting a playful spin on the band’s tendency to address the soul of America and its most grim problems.
