The Top 20 Albums of 2010 #5 Arcade Fire: The Suburbs

The Top 20 Albums of 2010

#5 Arcade Fire: The Suburbs

Words by Dirk Calloway 

Preface: This is a series that has been written daily (well, pretty much) since mid-April. The collection's pages have been viewed 1000 times now. It's been a wild ride and I've really enjoyed getting to know some new readers as a result of its publication. Check out the other 15 reviews here.

Well this is fairly predictable, isn't it? The Suburbs won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It reached #1 on the Billboard 200. Hell, it was so big, it even had 8 album covers. I'm still not sure which one's the real one! The record featured on dozens of other "top albums of 2010" lists. Everyone loved The Suburbs and I'm very late to the party to be singing its praises. Rather than try to compete with the likes of NME and Pitchfork, I'll instead try to explain what it is that makes it special to me.

For me, the selling point is this album's sonic consistency. It's an album shrouded in fog and smog. There's a hazy quality to it that means I can never just "play" one of its songs, by itself. The world of The Suburbs is - appropriately enough, given its title - completely enveloping. There are three reasons for this. Indulge me while I list them numerically...

1. The band took the finished version and pressed it to vinyl. They then took that 'master' and recorded the digital and CD versions from it. Essentially, this means they've compromised the sound quality to deliberately add another layer of shadow. 
2. The lyrics are thematically similar, from one song to another. There are even a couple of 'suites' where the tracks are immediately followed by their own second act. It's not what I'd call a concept album, but it's sure as hell consistent.
3. This is Arcade Fire, and they've got as many band members as there were people in Snow White's posse. With 8 folk hammering away at their instruments, often duplicating parts note-for-note as another musician, there's an echo in your ears that few other bands can replicate. This means they can give off this shrouded vibe live too. Check out the below video for an acoustic performance in a tiny room as an example:

Hot damn. If I could single out a lone example of the album's brilliance, I'd choose the song Suburban War. It's a beautiful piece, built around a guitar riff that descended from Simon and Garfunkel's The Sound of Silence. It soon becomes much more than that though. We march away from the initially intimate ambience of that riff to a full-blown battle. There are thunderous war drums and a tangible dread in the air. It turns out the fight is not literal though: we're witnessing an internal skirmish between the singer's memories and the harsh reality of his present. His emotions run true with me. They are 'of the moment' in a way that defines this as an unshakably modern record.

Last year was an uneasy one. The recession was over, but it didn't feel like it. Petrol prices weren't as high as 2008, but damned if I could afford a full tank of gas. Presidents who once had soaring poll results were at their lowest after attack upon attack from a reeling populace who lacked certainty in their jobs, mortgages or schools. In 2010, being in the suburbs was as comforting as a cold bath. I don't have enough fingers to count the redundancies I know about, and that's in New Zealand - a place with relative prosperity. Suburban War was the track that came to mind for me when I read a gloomy article in The Economist or saw John Stewart shrug a defeated sigh in 2010. When comics look glum mocking the news, you know the world's in a bit of a pickle. This song sums that up for me. "All my old friends, they don't know me now" indeed.

There's many more words I could type about this album, but that one song condenses its brilliance enough that I don't need to. This is an epic beast of a record, massive in scope but personal in nature. You'd be silly to miss out on it, so do me a favour and check it out already. Just promise me you'll listen to it from end-to-end on a good pair of speakers or headphones. You need to feel the haze of The Suburbs in your pores to truly understand it.

Tune in tomorrow folks, 'cause we've cracked The Top 5 Albums of 2010 now. May 7th will see me review an album that is dark, twisted and fantastic.