Everything Everything Review Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire
‘The Suburbs’
(Sonovox)

Arcade Fire are not like other bands. They are mysteriously able to utilise quite pedestrian rhythms, transcending the thump-thump-thump confines through the sheer power of their arrangements, and the ghostly preacher vocal of Win Butler.

That beguiling naivety is as intact on ‘The Suburbs’ as it ever was, only now the band are uncharacteristically restrained. Listening, you reach the conclusion that AF’s appeal was always more sophisticated than the bombastic organ-bolstered arrangements of their first two records would suggest. The unsettled, propulsive ‘We Used To Wait’, for example, shows how the band can deftly and ever-so slightly lean on their own music in the strangest and simplest of ways, giving it a unique slant. In general, the vast, at times unwieldy, sound of ‘Neon Bible’ has been superceded by tighter, icy synths and more conservative drum beats.

There is a real and timely sense of reduction here. It’s about the only way the band could hope or want to develop. Even the bigger moments (‘Rococo’’s grim progress) seem to have yawning chasms in the sound that less mature bands would fill with cymbals and choirs. We can all learn from this. It is a new, yet familiar, sound for the band. Only ‘Empty Rooms’ picks up where ‘Neon Bible’ left off, with its homely girl/boy vocals and that inimitable urgency.

Is it a concept record? Only in the sense that all AF albums are. The title and Butler’s interviews state this pretty plainly; it’s a letter from the suburbs, an account of a frustrating adolescence in these surroundings, redolent of The Smiths (“Spent the summer staring out of windows”, from ‘Wasted Hours’). This is coupled with a note of regret; a lament at the loss of nature and the ever-expanding sprawl of Western cities (“I hope to God I don’t live to see the death of all things wild”, prays Win).

Also incorporated is the occasional comment on the modern culture of instant gratification that Arcade Fire were never going to satiate; “We used to wait for it, now we scream and sing the chorus again.”

‘The Suburbs’ does end wonderfully. The album’s most optimistic moment, ‘Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)’, is sung by Regine Chassigne and boasts the kind of happy/sad bubbliness that made ABBA a much better pop group than anybody realises. This gives way to a reprise (that valued hallmark of 60s and 70s classics) of the opening title track, the original’s lolloping bar-room-‘n’ roll piano replaced by a less bright string section and some fragile vocals.

It’s the most emotionally developed and musically mature record Arcade Fire have produced. Yet, amongst all this there is something wearing in this long set of predominantly long songs. That omnipresent throb that has long been AF’s calling card is less vital now.

It is nonetheless a highly accomplished piece of music, gorgeously played, and conceived (as always) in total sincerity and with a constant disregard for outside influence. Enviable.

Jeremy Pritchard