Enough about that, here it is, the #1 album released this year, in my humble and subjective opinion. It's quite an obvious choice, you'd say, but it isn't. For as many skinny jeans I've worn, and as many Roskilde Festivals I've attended, I was never completely convinced about Arcade Fire. Well, maybe I was convinced, I knew they were a bloody astonishing band, but actually listening to it much wasn't really my thing.
With The Suburbs, things have changed. The band still employs the same overt melodrama, and for a band that has been always been a bit on the heavy-duty side, a concept album about something as serious as American suburbia might seem a daunting task. But Arcade Fire have lightened their grip on theatricality here. You just need to get a few tunes into it, to get a grasp on what this album is about. Win Butler is through every a register on this epic piece of work. At times, he sounds like an old, scarred man, reflecting on his past, and at times he sounds like exactly the youthful, daydreaming adolescent he must have been himself. That's on 'Ready To Start' for example, which is one of the strongest tracks on the album.
I find it very hard to point out exactly what makes The Suburbs much easier to devour than the band's two previous (genius) albums. I guess the right adjective would be light-footedness. Even some of the more dead serious tracks such as the magnificent 'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)' and 'City With No Children' seem to jump along in a pleasant way, while of course not losing their vital pathos. A lot of this is courtesy of the band including more synthesizers into their machine park.
It wouldn't be fair to mention this album without highlighting its lyrical content. I'm still only scraping the surface of it, but I am very intrigued by the entire concept, and by the very elegant way Butler and his gang have come around it. The Suburbs has a strong theme that recurs throughout, but never in a tiresome way, and suburbia itself is such a perpetual subject. Butler's observations are very sharp, and there are numerous impressive lyrical passages scattered about on the album, that it would take up too much room to mention them here.
And there are just so many highlights in general. There is the above mentioned 'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains', not to mention its lesser cousin, 'Sprawl I (Flatland)', which is the suburbia-theme at its most intimate and climactic. Then there's the frantic 'Empty Room', the chillingly emotional 'We Used To Wait', the grand 'Half Light II (No Celebration)', and the gritty 'Month of May'. There's so much to this album, and it's only just begun to creep up on me, which is why it's the year's number 1...
