Well, what can I say about The Arcade Fire that hasn’t already been said? They are the maturation of disaffected youth. They are the past tense of jaded angst. If Funeral was an ode to the desperate longing of school age love, then The Suburbs has got to be the summation of that unrequited ennui more than half a decade later. Six years of listless reverie met with the uncomfortable inevitability of waning light. “Une Année Sans Lumière” seems laughable when stacked up against eternity. That is the drive of The Suburbs. The innocence of Funeral is built up into a caricature of itself when the sad truth is, there doesn’t seem to be any innocence left. Love becomes antagonism. Hope becomes dejection. Aspiration becomes scorn. Hey, growing up sucks, but at least there’s good music.

The funny thing is, I might have said something similar about Neon Bible in 2007, but The Suburbs helps put everything in perspective. In a lot of ways, I’ve grown up on Arcade Fire. Funeral found me as a fledgling adult beginning to understand the daily grind everybody was always talking about. “Tunnels” was the anthem of my then long-distance relationship, while “Power Out” was the soundtrack to my initiation into the real world. Like most of us, it spoke to me. The difference between Funeral and the ensuing Neon Bible was that on the latter the Arcade Fire were just speaking at us. Though less personally compelling, the exalting self-righteousness of the messages at hand are in a lot of ways just as easily relatable. Who isn’t pissed off by hypocritical Christians? Bible was essentially the same narrative of personal strife, just through a much larger, all-encompassing scope. Everyone’s journey though life’s trials is different, but at least as an American, the trials themselves overlap. Bible was nothing if not ambitious, so that’s probably why it wasn’t a huge surprise that The Suburbs took an hour and sixteen tracks to get through.

The title track had me briefly hoping this album was going to play out with something of a ‘Burbs-ian vibe. The hesitating melody certainly portrays the Americana façade with a dirty secret motif, but it is decidedly more tongue in cheek than the rest of the album. At this point, I feel obliged to mention the obvious Springsteen influence. Really it seems like you can’t make a record about suburban life without garnering such a reference, especially with acts like The Hold Steady and Gaslight Anthem blowing up the spot. The other big influence here has got to be The Talking Heads. The Suburbs takes their familiar themes and spikes them with a little of that decidedly Arcade Fire bombast. The concept of the suburbs has changed dramatically since the fifties, and even in our lifetime. But in a lot of ways it’s the same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

“City With No Children” spells out the difference between the songwriting of Bible and where they are now. Win Butler considers those blasted on Bible, lamenting, “I used to think I was not like them, but I’m beginning to have my doubts.” On “Rococo” the band similarly reassigns the blame, this time not only to themselves, but also to mindless trend followers (which is probably a large portion of their fanbase). The fact that this chamber pop track goes by “Rococo” seems like an admission of at least past poser-hood or scenester-dom. The point is, while it’s easy (and indeed fun) to blame the government, the church, the media, and other various bigwigs, the reality is we’re all to blame for the state of the suburbs/country/world. A grand statement, to be sure, but no less true. Growing up does suck, and sometimes what sucks the most is owning up to personal shortcomings that have long since been rationalized and compartmentalized. I’m just glad I’m still on the blaming others phase. Stupid Christians.

You can call the overwhelming earnestness of this latest effort something of a return to form, but I won’t. Call me crazy, but Arcade Fire, namely Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, seem more like the living in the moment type. Clearly, there is retrospect and nostalgia that colors this album, but as Régine put it on “In the Backseat,” “I've been learning to drive. My whole life, I've been learning.” It’d be great if we could all just be passengers on the journey of our lives, watching life as it unfolds, but eventually we have to grow up and take the wheel. The Suburbs is a new page, but if you must, you can think of it as a maturation Funeral. For most of the record, the maturity is a good thing, but on the two-part tracks, I really could have gone for some of those old spastic tendencies. I don’t want to be so presumptuous as to tell Arcade Fire their business, but it really seems like these two split tracks would have been better suited as single compositions. “Crown of Love” demonstrated the group’s ability to play on the dramatic differences/similarities between a suicide note and a love letter. So yeah, The Suburbs cannot match the excitement of either of the first two records, but really, isn’t that what growing up is all about?

Track List:

1. The Suburbs
2. Ready to Start
3. Modern Man
4. Rococo
5. Empty Room
6. City With No Children
7. Half Light I
8. Half Light II (No Celebration)
9. Suburban War
10. Month of May
11. Wasted Hours
12. Deep Blue
13. We Used to Wait
14. Sprawl (Flatland)
15. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
16. The Suburbs (continued)