Arcade Fire: Suburbs

Sometimes I Can’t Believe It/ I’m Moving Past The Feeling

The Thought hits sometime in the middle of the album. “Holy Shit they can’t keep this up can they?” How long can Arcade Fire continue to be perfect? I pull them up on I Tunes and peruse the track list of their three albums. Have they even written a bad song?... Nope. I mean sure I’ve been known to press the skip button on “In The Backseat” and “Black Wave” when taking a jog, but neither are what I would call bad, just not conducive to cardio vascular health. But probabilistically speaking, they eventually have to write a bad song don’t they? I mean Win Butler and his merry band can’t just continue to create music that fills the mind with an autumnal dread and the soul with a stirring sense of grandeur. They can’t continue to craft music that blends Springsteenian uplift and drama, with Eno era Bowie sonic ambition, and the lyrical grace and scope of Dylan at his very best, touched with a wicked sense of humor Zevon would envy. .

If The Businessmen Drink My Blood/ Like The Kids In Art School Said They Would/ Then I Guess I Will Begin Again/ You Say Can We Still Be Friends?

Can They?

Let’s Go Downtown and Watch The Modern Kids/ They’ll Eat Right Out Of Your Hand/ Using Great Big Words That They Don’t Understand

Right now the question seems tantalizingly open. If Arcade Fire keeps doing what they’re doing, they’re on track to become not merely a great rock band (they’re indisputably that already) but one of the greatest Rock bands of all time.

The Summer That I Broke My Arm I Waited For Your Letter/ I Have No Feeling For You Now That I Know You Better

This is the first time (with the possible exception of The White Stripes) that I’ve gotten the thrill of being in the midst of a Band’s career rather then coming in safely at the end. The era I grew up in wasn’t a particularly inspiring time for music. The Ambitious music I listened to where definitely of the past. Bands like The Pixies, and Nirvana were presented to me as closed loops. Bands with beginnings and definite safe ends. And lets not even get into the institutions like Floyd, The Clash, and Springsteen (Just a quick sidenote, “No Surrender” came up on my Shuffle the other day. What a great song. And its like what the seventh best on Born In The USA? The eighth? Calling him The Boss still underrates him.) Even with modern bands I admire; Modest Mouse, Tegan & Sara, and The Drive By Truckers, I arrived late to the party, with all three having already firmly established their sound by the time I first heard their music.

I Wished I Could Have Loved You/ Before Our Age Was Through/ Before A World War Does With Us/ Whatever It Will Do

My point is at this point in their career, Arcade Fire seems as if they can go anywhere. And what’s more that they just might. And they haven’t let greatestness ossify them either. Something like Suburbs sounds like what you would expect an Arcade Fire single to sound like, haunting, operatic, and lyrical. But Modern Man is basically a practical joke. Roccoco starts off as the latter then ends up the former as it slowly turns its gibberish chorus into a cathedral of sound. While tracks like Empty Rooms and Month Of May, have the low to the ground scrappiness present on the likes of Laika and Keep The Car Running. Unlike a lot of Rock bands with literary ambitions, Arcade Fire never forgets to, well rock.

Never Trust A Millionaire/ Quoting The Sermon On The Mount/ I Used To Think I Was Not Like Them/ Now I Have My Doubts

In short Suburbs is beautiful, ambitious, and most importantly whole. It’s a head phone album made like its ignorant of the fact that no one makes Head Phone Albums anymore. Undoubtably, some will find this review hyperbolic. Some will say that I’m simply setting myself up for disappointment. And the people who claim that are probably right.

“Now Our Lives Are Changing Fast/ Hope That Something Pure Can Last”

But what if they’re not?

EDIT: Small detail but an important one. The last track is built to loop into the first one for continous play. The more times I listen to the album the more convinced I am that its Fire's "Wish You Where Here"

Tegan & Sara Vs. Lady Gaga

VS.

Have you seen the new Lady Gaga video? That woman is not a person, she’s a super villain who has somehow escaped from the pages of Scott Pilgrim, and is going to enslave the world through her brand of Warhollian spectacle. Make no mistake Lady Gaga is completely fucking evil, but that just makes her kind of fascinating.



She seems like the end point of pop, and say what you will about her, she seems a true diva. Unlike the caught in the head lights bovine look that defined certain unnamed Pop stars at the beginning of the decade Gaga has turned herself into the event. What makes her special is that there is nobody who’s even pretending that she’s famous for her musical ability. Her fame is completely by decree and by virtue of the fact that she has removed the parts of her brain where shame and awkwardness register. Who gives a fuck if she can sing when she’ll wear a white latex bondage suit, and then a “real life” anime suit that will disturb even the most dedicated fetishists, all before she lights herself on fire while wearing a bearskin, in the process of prostituting herself to Baron Underbeight? Sure why not have her back up dancers be the roadshow cast of Eyes Wide Shut On the sets of Clockwork Orange? The music itself is so utterly beside the point that it’s kind of flabbergasting.

Still every action has an equal but opposite reaction, and if Gaga’s escape from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s head spells our certain catchy flamboyant doom, there’s a certain pair of super powered twins who have come to save us.

Tegan and Sara are simply great songwriters, as dedicated as Gaga is blaise. And the best part is they’re so unabashedly pop that if they announced a collaboration with The Archies tomorrow I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s nothing small about Tegan & Sara’s songs, though there is plenty that’s intimate. They create soaring antechambers of melody. Listen to Arrow off their newest album.


The sound is as big as anything off of Gaga’s hot tranny mess. And Tegan & Sara’s image, playing cannily on the aloof private nature of twins is probably just as carefully calculated as Gaga’s. But the craft and care in the song sets it apart completely. The haunting melody, dramatic use of discord as punctuation, combined with, a stunning live presence, and drop dead cool persona. If their was any justice in the world Tegan & Sara’s following would be a real life counter part to Dethlok. Why they’d be bigger then Lady Gaga.

Inevitably the two will battle to the death. Hopefully on a Space station that is telecasting their concert to every screen in the world Interstella 5555 style. Its nice to have twin angels fighting on the side of our soul.


EDIT: AND THEN IT HAPPENED (COURTESY OF DEPTFORD. Click to see it in all its heavenly glory rebigified. Which I failed to find a way to do on the page.