ARCADE FIRE - ‘THE SUBURBS’
Published: Music Australia Guide #79, August 2010.

Arcade Fire
The Suburbs
****
(Spunk/EMI) 

The notion of a third chapter in the Arcade Fire oeuvre hasn’t sat comfortably for many pundits. The Montreal collective’s 2004 debut Funeral and 2007 follow-up Neon Bible were so universally celebrated that to many, third album The Suburbs was almost going to be a disappointment by default. Luckily, from the jangling piano, subtly building orchestration and haze-drenched volume of its opener and title track, this hour-long, 16-sketch epic is anything but. Indeed, The Suburbs is a record brimming with swathes of sonic, melodic and lyrical detail. But while Win Butler and co have never lacked artist bombast, this album finds its orientation seems as much in temperance and balance of potentially divergent strands as the booming, baroque projection of ideas. There are some fine examples. The maximalist orchestrations of Rococo and the flurrying strings of duet Empty Room rub shoulders with the funereal phrases and shimmering drones of Half Light I and the odd acoustic strumming patterns of Suburban War, while elsewhere, the elegiac Sprawl I (Flatland) gives way to the pulsing, Kate Bush-esque electronic hook of Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). Lyrically, too, The Suburbs walks something of a tightrope between opposing forces. Where Funeral mourned the passing of youth and Neon Bible recoiled in shock at world gone mad, The Suburbs sketches a backdrop of palce, resonance and memory. It tells a tale of the vast and the intimate, of proximity and distance, of the sense that wherever you go, you’ll always be anchored to your past.

DAN RULE 

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