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Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

 Write what you know. Never fails. On Neon Bible, Arcade Fire stepped outside and took a picture. Win Butler wrote what he saw. The Suburbs, on the other hand, spills from his every pore. It lives because Win (and brother Will) experienced it. And luckily for him, so did a lot of other people. Good times and bad. Born in California, the Butlers grew up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. Win Butler has described the album as a letter from the suburbs.

In a lot of ways, The Suburbs is a return to Arcade Fire’s earlier, pre-Neon Bible sound – less bombastic, less over-the-top, more personal. The lyrical themes, combined with the atmospheric tension of everything from modern synths to swirling strings and French horns, capture the pining, everyday whims of suburban life – the city looming in the background. The album reeks of isolation, loneliness and frustration. Being misunderstood. Wanting more. You can feel it in the music.

“Month of May” is surprisingly punk-rock and direct-sounding for Arcade Fire. “2009, 2010, wanna make a record how I felt then,” sings Win. You can just picture his younger incarnation listening to The Clash in his forced suburban stronghold, The Woodlands, dreaming of the world outside. Just as surprising, “Sprawl II” is almost straight-up electro synth-pop, with Régine Chassagne’s sweet vocals washing over a retro, Goldfrapp-ish, MGMT-like backdrop. “Ready to Start” is The Suburbs’ “Keep the Car Running,” with a strong whiff of The Cure.

“Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small that we can never get away from the sprawl. Living in the sprawl, dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains.”

Win Butler may claim to be a modern man, but with Arcade Fire, time is irrelevant. There’s an old-fashioned, vintage, baroque quality to them that’s hard to carbon date. Just to give you an idea, the band mastered each song to a 12-inch lacquer and then transferred them back for the digital master. So the digital version sounds as close to the vinyl version as possible. Unlike Neon Bible, The Suburbs is less-commentary, more meditation. There’s more tension. And as a result, it says so much more…

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