Arcade Fire

“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”
from the album The Suburbs
2010
iTunes

Memory, childhood, home. These are big subjects that have obsessed novelists, movie makers, playwrights and songwriters for decades, if not centuries. Now the Arcade Fire, a band not known for thinking small, tackles them all in its third studio album, The Suburbs.

When the Arcade Fire burst into sudden prominence in 2004 with its rousing debut album, Funeral, a process accelerated by the kind of viral enthusiasm normally reserved for Paris Hilton home movies and Kanye West tweets, the excitement was tempered by one nagging doubt: Was this just another built-to-implode Internet flash?

But the Montreal septet has now proven its staying power, making three very different albums in a span of six years. Whereas Funeral inspired shout-from-the-rafters sing-alongs, a blast of live-for-the-moment resolve at a time of mourning, Neon Bible (2007) was ominous and claustrophobic, a skeptical look at an era that conflates religion, war and consumerism. If Funeral was about having faith in each other, Neon Bible was about losing faith in the institutions that try to manage our lives.

The title song that opens The Suburbs signals another thematic and sonic shift. It’s lighter than anything Arcade Fire has done in the past, with its bouncy piano and skip-along beat, an invitation into an album that seems to expand as it progresses, not unlike the sprawling communities it describes. The song’s jauntiness melts into a mass of ghost-like voices and the tone shifts to something more evanescent. The narrator recalls the expectations and dreams he once had as a child and questions whether he has lived up to them.

“It meant nothing,” he sings, and later expresses his own lack of resolve: “Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m moving past the feeling.”

Band leader Win Butler and his younger brother Will grew up in the suburbs of Houston, a sun-baked sea of golf courses, shopping malls and utilitarian but largely anonymous houses. In other words, it could’ve been anywhere. That setting describes millions of childhoods, a vast, blank universality that Arcade Fire fills in with personal detail and a deep sense of longing.

Though “suburbia” has long been shorthand for homogenized mediocrity in the arts, Win Butler and his bandmates don’t allow themselves to indulge in such easy, condescending dismissals. Instead they invest their upbringing with a mix of fondness and regret, wistfulness and disappointment, and that tension is nurtured by music that is among the richest, subtlest and most unsettling of the band’s career.

Amid this disquieting beauty, the 16 songs and fragments melt one into the next, populated by interlocking characters and images. Memo to shuffle-obsessed iPod listeners: Even more so than its two predecessors, The Suburbs is an Arcade Fire album designed to be heard as a whole in a specific sequence.

Two sets of paired songs find Win Butler and his wife, multi-instrumentalist Regine Chassagne, answering each other with distinct but complementary takes on a community that feels as impersonal as a massive airport concourse. “Someone please cut the lights,” Chassagne pleads on “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” responding to her declaration in an earlier song that “In the half light, we’re free.”

References to cars and long drives pop up continually, not as a means of liberation and escape as in a Chuck Berry or Bruce Springsteen song, but as symbols of a transitory existence that make the concept of “home” feel increasingly elusive. In “Suburban War,” desperation overtakes hope as the narrator tries to reconnect with an old friend, searching for him in each passing car.

The music fits the imagery, with lonely-asteroid keyboards, anxious strings, sadly chiming Byrds-like progressions (“Suburban War”), skeletal guitar riffs that faintly echo old Cure songs (“Modern Man”) and wordless harmonies creating a sense of vastness and space unlike any previous Arcade Fire album. The beats are more mechanical, rather than the polyrhythmic rush of old. A handful of rockers break up a thicket of midtempo songs; without “Month of May” the last half of the album is in danger of sounding monochromatic. But there is so much quiet passion and rich musical detail, it’s difficult to pinpoint any songs that the album could sacrifice. As if to demonstrate it hasn’t forgotten what got it to this point in its career, the band brings it all home with “Sprawl II,” creating an unlikely anthem out of a mirror-ball disco beat, glacial synthesizers and the pleading urgency of Chassagne’s vocal.

Her fire contrasts with the melancholy in Win Butler’s voice. More than anything, this is an album not just about loss of innocence, but the erosion of ideals that aging inevitably brings. With it comes disconnection from everything that once mattered: home, friends, family, dreams.

The relationship of a rock band to its audience serves as convenient metaphor for all of the above. When Butler sings “Kids are all standin’ with their arms folded tight” in “Month of May,” it could be taken as a putdown of cooler-than-thou indie-rock fans. But it’s actually an expression of empathy; these were once kids just like him, who grew up screaming in delight, unconcerned about what anyone else might think of them. The Butler of The Suburbs longs to regain that feeling, and the only way he knows how is to make a record that “blow(s) the wires away.” But as these bittersweet songs make clear, even that may not be enough.