Ryan's Arcade Fire Review

Growing up in the suburbs puts you in an interesting place socially, especially if you're the sort of person who has interests that lie outside the mainstream. You spend a lot of time around people who don't understand the things you like, be they music, independent cinema, underground comics, or whatever. So you find your nearest downtown and start spending time there, visiting places were people gel with what you're into. A lot of those people, though, have nothing but disdain for the suburbs and the type of lives they think suburbanites have, so there's a new barrier erected between yourself and the culture you want to be part of. At least, that was always my experience with suburban life.

I don't know how much of that experience applies to The Arcade Fire, but I do think that it's an important context to have when listening to this album; that feeling - of being in a scene, but not fully of it, of eternally being an outsider - permeates every aspect and every track of The Suburbs. That feeling of rootlessness, of wanting so badly to belong to something cool - it's a bit cliche to say it, but when Win Butler sings thinks like "There's nothing to do/But I don't mind when I'm with you", I feel like I didn't so much listen to this album as I lived it, and even on my first listen it felt as familiar as the corner stores and the mazes of residential courts, lanes, and drives that I wandered as a kid. I wouldn't quite call it a celebration of suburban life, but it is an understanding of it that you don't often find in much of modern music.

These themes - of being rootless, or being an outsider - are especially resonant for The Arcade Fire in 2011, because they've had a lot of success, but it seems to me that that success has only served to entrench their status as outsiders. They did win a Grammy, after all, and a Juno to go with it, and in doing so were immediately thrust into the spotlight of the mainstream; at the same time, though, they're still on an independent label, and that 'indie spirit', for lack of a better term, so they don't seem to fit with most of what's in the mainstream. At the same time, that success has come with a cost - I've seen the term 'sell-out' thrown out about this band in a completely unjustifiable manner, and a few blogs and tweets that have wondered if The Arcade Fire is too big for the Polaris Prize (which is a nonsensical comment, but I digress). Music made by outsiders, about being an outsider, that just drives them further outside - there's a poetry to that that parallels the music of The Suburbs nicely.

Standout tracks: Ready To Start, Modern Man, Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)