All My CDs, pt 6: The Suburbs

Maybe it’s time I stopped trying desperately to write unique intros to these reviews.

The Suburbs - The Arcade Fire

If I got Funeral under un-hipsterish circumstances, The Suburbs was no different. I’d considered checking it out after it was recommended by a favorite webcomic artist, and then I heard that it had won a Grammy for “album of the year,” taking by surprise all the music fans who had never heard of The Arcade Fire. That’s when I bought it. At first I was a bit unimpressed with The Suburbs, which struck me as far less passionate and interesting than Funeral. It’s true than the overall sonic and thematic tone is a bit less textured, but after repeated listening I came to realize that it was still very good.

In some ways, the more subtle and low-contrast quality makes it more deeply appreciable and contributes to its underlying messages as a concept album.  After all, the suburbs themselves are less differentiated, more homogenous, and less exuberant than either the city or the countryside. Moreover, the instrumentation in The Suburbs also skews more electronic and synthesized than Funeral, perhaps reflecting the artificial nature of the suburban sprawl the lyrics constantly allude to. But when you listen to the music, it speaks of a genuine soulfulness that exists even in the midst of such artificiality, and that is the driving force behind the album’s quiet power.

I’ve lived most of my life in a city known for being more urban than its size would suggest. When I bought The Suburbs, I was living in a more stereotypically suburban town, complete with blocks of boxlike houses, abundant strip malls, and a complete dearth of coffeeshops or poetry slams. I had never felt more out of place, trapped in a pseudo-community where I felt no kinship with my neighbors and no attachment to the land. I thought that the suburbs had no culture because I did not share in their culture. I was wrong.

It’s common to assume that a suburban life is necessarily less soulful, less artful, than an urban one (with its vibrant and hot-blooded diversity) or a rural one (with its closeness to nature and tradition). It’s also common to make similar assumptions about modern living, dependence on technology, social media, and other “mindless” pop-cultural phenomena. There is often doubt about whether the youngest cultural movements of the world even qualify as “culture”. People debate such questions as whether lolcats are art - or dismiss such debates as beneath their consideration entirely.

I’m a member of a generation currently coming of age, a generation who were children in the 90s, adolescents in the early 21st century, and uniquely familiar with both technological abundance and economic decline. We are citizens of a world that is growing and dying at the same time - where “dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains.” The lyrics and music found in The Suburbs speaks to me of that world and specifically my generation, more so than most other music I’ve heard. If for no other reason (and there are other reasons), this will remain a very special album to me.

It occurs to me I haven't mentioned any specific songs here. It's true that the album's overall consistency makes it difficult to pick favorites, but a few stand out to me anyway: Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), Ready to Start, City With No Children, and Rococo, to name a few. I don't really dislike any of them.

Next: Not Accepted Anywhere