ARCADE FIRE - The Suburbs

Is it OK to admit that you're not the target audience for an album? That's a silly question; of course it is. I have no issues shrugging off Lady Gaga or My Chemical Romance albums as Things That Were Not Made With Me In Mind. But what about when you actually really like the band in question? What about when it’s a pretty great record?

It may be early on in my time with the album, but regardless of how beautiful or catchy many of the songs are, or how skillfully and ambitiously rendered its concept may be, it is safe to say that as a 36-year-old dad, The Suburbs was not made for me. Because even though I did grow up in a subdivision (several, in fact), I have, to paraphrase Win Butler in the title track, “moved past the feeling”.

A true double album (i.e. not just a overlong CD that needs to be pressed on two slabs of vinyl), The Suburbs is easily Arcade Fire’s most contemplative and evenly-paced record. Its charms, much like the living spaces about which it is written, require some living in to detect their distinct features amongst the sameness. But that’s kind of the point. Distinct, affecting features do, in fact, exist—both in The Suburbs, the album, and in the actual suburbs in which many of us grew up.

This is the station at which I am at as a listener. I can drive through the spaces of my youth and see places of potent memory my friends and I forged amongst the cookie-cutter homes and endless strip malls. They do not exist as public landmarks. They are far more private than that. But they do exist and they reveal deep truths about how humans can circumvent the banality of that environment’s sameness. Indeed, it could be argued that it is this very sameness that pushes for greater development of imagination in those formative years—that the suburbs were not so much a cage, as an excellent crucible in which to develop a hungrier, more innovative adult mind.

But these are not the suburbs of The Suburbs. The characters of this record still haven’t broken free. They’re “moving past the feeling”, but they’ve not yet moved on. If that means that the lyrical side of this record is met with frustration by me—an annoyance that so much time is spent brewing on the topic without presenting the listener with real hope or ways forward—then so be it. My needs now are different than they once were. But if this record had come out in 1991, I think it just might have saved my life. Fortunately, I had other records at that time to fill that void. Here and now, in 2010, Arcade Fire’s third record is meant for someone else. That’s hardly a bad thing.