The sound of the suburbs
ARCADE FIRE's third album is a sprawling 16-song epic that evokes everyone from The Byrds to The Ramones.
Peter Murphy, 29 Jul 2010
The ‘burbs are taboo in rock ‘n' roll. The homogenous sprawl has produced a succession of blank generations who grew up to be Dylans or Strummers or Springsteens or Smiths, but musicians still tend to get shifty about middle-class origins, compelled to forge a fictional bio in which the principal was dropped to earth in a Martian pod, raised by carny folk, hopped trains from the age of ten and taught himself to write songs on a one-string lyre won from Blind Deaf & Dumb Ziggy Boy Williamson in a fleabag motel poker game.
Investigative biographers inevitably discover a more mundane reality: scratch the skin of any self-created working-class hero and you'll find the son or daughter of a civil servant or schoolteacher. Arcade Fire's Win Butler made the above point in an NPR interview last month, in which he and his brother Will premiered two songs from his band's much-anticipated third album The Suburbs, a record whose themes and atmospheres hark back to their childhood in Houston.
"You can put negative connotations on anything, but I think the thing about when you grow up in the suburbs is you have to make your own artistic culture," says AF drummer Jeremy Gara, a few hours after HP has been given a preview of the new album. And true enough, Arcade Fire know all about the rub between mythic and mundane. The band's debut Funeral created a world within a world: its originality stemmed from a synthesis of post-punk fire, post-rock scope, Motown scaled arrangements, and Lord of the Flies meets Pan's Labyrinth imagery. The follow up, Neon Bible, was by contrast a lock-caps bold type state-of-the-nation address that introduced Orbison to Orwell and Woody Guthrie by way of 4AD. Both records sounded like they'd been directed by Terry Gilliam. The new set is closer to Wes or PT Anderson territory. If anything, the closest cultural reference point is probably Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. You can feel the camera move through lawn sprinkered streets, panning over kids with bicycles and skateboards, peeking through windows into shag-carpeted TV-illuminated living rooms.
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