Listen Up: Knocking The Suburbs

A new Arcade Fire record came out last week, and at this point it's a well-noted fact that it contains only a few scraps of the anthemic urgency for which the band, on its two previous albums, had become so well-loved. At the risk of coming off like One Of Those People Who Just Wishes They'd Make A Hundred Albums Like Funeral, I will admit: I missed the bombast, too. But only a little bit, and only until I realized what, exactly, was getting the band so worked up in those moments that they do, in fact, get so worked up. And then I just wished they'd never even bothered.

What whips the seven members of Arcade Fire into a lather these days? What are they building up to in those few would-be wonderful, fleeting outbursts of earnest, desperate musical passion? Not what they used to let loose on, not death or religion or rebuilding after the fall or fathers taking it as God's will to exploit his children or cars or space ships or anything else so ostentatious. No. The band's new record is called The Suburbs and it is pretty much just about the suburbs—or, at least, the vague concerns that a somewhat-thoughtful middle-class white person might experience during and after residing there: a dueling sense of loathing and nostalgia, the urgency of leaving and the weird pain of returning, the adolescent battle of giving yourself over to the sweet anesthesia of apathy and cul-de-sacs named after long-decimated forests versus holding tight to some sense of yourself as the crush and rush of adulthood tries to strip away your precious purity and idealism. Oh, also, because this is Arcade Fire, there are bombs falling somewhere. Maybe real ones. Maybe metaphorical ones. Maybe both!

I find this just about as compelling as any non-musical discussion of the same topic—which is to say, kind of? Because I grew up in the suburbs and had those same fears and still go back often and drive down the same roads I learned to drive on and experience bemusement at all the new, identical neighborhoods that have wheedled in where there used to be family farms and lovely stands of trees. The last few years I spent in the suburbs were the years immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, and so my time there was marred, too, by fears of bombs and waking up in a field of decimated tract-houses. My town was divided by a river, like the town in The Suburbs seems to be, and there were mountains too—mountains beyond mountains, even. My suburban life also had its share of vague signifiers—parents' car keys, parks, malls, downtowns, unsent letters—but, unlike the suburbs of this album, which are seemingly populated exclusively by material cliches, that wasn't all it had. My suburbs were filled with people, too—characters, names, faces and personalities I recognized and cared about, despite whatever malaise I might've felt living there. Sometimes it even seemed like there might be some sort of narrative arc forming out of the muddle of our shared everyday life, or at least some series of anecdotes that could be strung together to tell some larger story about the place. And there was, at least, a sense of place.

It's not that I wish the lyrics of these songs more closely reflected my experience. I just wish they reflected some experience—any at all. The album has eight covers, each a mottled photograph taken from inside an old car; in each version, the car is the same, but the view is different—different parking lots, driveways, brick ranch houses, vinyl-sided tract homes, palm trees, leafless oaks. Perhaps this explains it, then: Aesthetically and lyrically, the album is striving for some sense of universality. Lead singer/songwriter Win Butler has boiled his words down to what he sees as most essential, most commonplace, in the sad, shared lives of American suburban youth, as if the endless looping roads and stripmalls has rendered them all—us all—of relating to any material or emotional details beyond their own small lives.

Even the trademark Arcade Fire apocalyptica is frustratingly vague, though it does serve the vital function of upping the album's stakes from “nonexistent” to “pretty low.” Without all the bombs falling nearby, without whatever awful thing has happened in San Francisco, without the times and how they are repeatedly said to be changing, this is just a series of boring stories about boring people being bored in a boring place. But with all the inexplicit dangers thrown in, it becomes a series of boring stories about boring people being bored in a boring place when really they should probably be scared out of their minds. This is so frustrating that it incites a kind of meta-panic in the heart of the listener, like watching a kid chase a ball out into the street, and there's a car coming, and the driver's not watching, and now the kid's running after a butterfly, and the car's getting closer and closer and closer and—

Nothing ever happens.

The band has cared so damn much in the past that it's worth asking whether this is supposed to be some kind of damning commentary on the toxic irony and apathy of “kids today,” but they're not any more spooked themselves. As the bombs are falling, they're fussing about the pretensions of crossed-armed art-school kids and rueing poor neighborhood planning. Shouldn't they be freaking out? We know they can do it! Who else will earnestly alert us to the impending doom of modern life, in three-minute anthem form or otherwise, if not Arcade Fire? Who else will tell us the sky is falling? I'd say they slaughtered and roasted Chicken Little, but they're probably all vegetarians, so I don't even know what's going on. Win Butler's looking a little dark under the eyes, lately—maybe it's an iron deficiency? Mono? Carbon monoxide leak?

It's not that I wish this record was Funeral, necessarily. I just wish it was some other, better record than what it actually is. The songs sound OK, but also like they could be played by pretty much any other band with more than a few members and a passing acquaintance with strings-arranger Owen Pallet. But then, to borrow a line from Jon Pareles, the lyrics make me wish I didn't understand English. There were moments on Neon Bible that made me cringe ("MTV" rhymed with "World War III," oh boy) but most of the new songs hardly deserve that minute calorie expenditure. There are perhaps enough compelling lines and ideas on the record to fill up a slight EP, but even then I might wonder why the band even bothered.

As a songwriter, Win Butler does have a strong suit: transposing all of his bleeding-heart earnestness onto people and places mostly of his own construction, painting tender portraits of love after the fall, and perhaps even tackling some other subject matter he hasn't yet considered, like, I dunno, the planets of our solar system. But he doesn't seem all that comfortable writing songs that explore anything resembling any unobscured aspect of his own actual life. Here, he sings about the streets where he learned to drive, about revisiting old parks, about driving around trying—and failing—to find the house he grew up in. Knowing that he and his brother (and bandmate) Will grew up in the interminable sprawl of The Woodlands, Texas, and that the rest of the band claims roots in various suburban outposts across Canada, it's fair to assume this is least a loosely fictionalized account of something he's done or thought of doing. But we learn nothing, really, of his life on those streets or in that park or in that house—what happened there, who he knew, whether he was ever happy. We don't even really know how he feels about going back; all we get is the lyrical equivalent of him returning to these old places and staring blankly at them. Either he has no thoughts about them, or he doesn't care to dignify them with comment. Either way, it doesn't make for an especially compelling pseudo-concept record.

The Suburbs is precisely the kind of album I would have been utterly enamored with the summer after my senior year in high school—when I was still so worried about war, when I was grappling with leaving all the places I was so familiar with and trying to figure out if they were landmarks or just hitching posts, when I generally demanded less depth from everything. “We Used to Wait,” Butler's ode to the lost art of letter-writing, would have struck me to my core—not just because of all the letters I was planning to write my old friends once I moved into the dorms that fall, but also for its “like a patient on a table” nod to T.S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which those friends and I pretty much agreed was the pinnacle of the English language along with every other smartish eighteen-year-old girl in America. If I'd heard Regine Chassagne crooning, so defiantly and so sadly, “They heard me singing and they told me to stop / Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock," I would have gravely nodded along, girding my loins to better face the adult reality that undoubtedly awaited me.

I would have loved this album then, and I would now probably think of my then-love for the album the same way I think of my then-love for so many other things—with a chuckle and a sigh of relief that those feelings have passed. (Kind of like Ben Folds' Rockin' the Suburbs, an album that takes a more wry, thumbnail-sketch approach to a similar subject.) At that time, though, I thought the things I loved then would be the things I loved always. (Actually, whatever. I still love Rockin' the Suburbs.) But if I'd tried to live rest of my life by whatever code my teenaged self might have conscripted for me, if I'd kept fighting those same battles as if they would always be the most important ones, I would have lost my mind—or, worse, just become an incredibly dull human being.

Which is another problem with The Suburbs—how the few concerns the album does have seem to be nothing more than adolescent holdovers that've festered and grown into the defining struggle of its adult life: Apathy, clock-punching, not-fitting-in, wasted beauty. It doesn't directly scoff at the people who didn't bother to fight the sprawl, who never left to be able to make a hesitant return, but it clearly values freedom and purity above all else. Who's really free here, though? The ones who stayed, who tore down the old buildings and built new ones, who populate the tract-homes and drab offices with no conflict in their hearts, who likely don't think very much about their lives but who go on living it, day to day? Or those that think themselves more noble for having wrested their lives from suburbia's grasp but return time and time again to stare blankly into the abyss of their former lives, apparently feeling so moved by the great gaping void of their experience that they write great gaping voids of records about it? Wasn't the point to move on to something greater, to sculpt your life in your own way, to free yourself from the bored cops and tessellating malls and miles of miles of identical nothingness?

To be sure, there are things you can try but never fully evacuate yourself from. Death is one of those things. Religion, too. And Arcade Fire has fantastically and clumsily tackled both before, to at least somewhat rousing ends. These things are built into the complicated circumstances of our birth; they are not physical places, they are not able to be escaped, they will always hang like huge white birds around our necks—and so it seems a sensible thing to do, to sing many desperate, beautiful, wonderful songs about them, like this band has done, even though they will only ever stare blankly back at you, unimpressed. That's all suburbia will ever do, too. But with it, at least, you can turn your back, climb into your mother's car and leave it all behind.

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s associate editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday. She recommends the new Frontier Ruckus record to anyone looking for a more intimately engaging portrait of the weirdness of suburbia that also makes use of the phrase "dead malls."