It 's more or less always been an album that looks like that. An album that is virtually impossible, as well as useless, to describe each piece. "The Suburbs " can only be described as a complessso if taken in its entirety. I think I can safely say that this is a concept album, whose theme is the suburbia and all that this may cause. Each song
offers the same themes from different points and see everything is connected and continuously. Time and space are torn to pieces, as well as the feelings of the inhabitants of suburbia, an artificial apparently meaningless. Apparently it is the place where they grow the heroes of this epic pop and they are to give meaning to otherwise cold and inhospitable places. And 'as if it were all played on the contrast: the present against the past (and the nostalgia that can result from such thoughts), the contempt for these suburban places against the disease which will inevitably test the places where it grows, the current generation against generation past, resignation and hope, children vs adults, sadness vs. anger, one against the other neighborhood, but of course I am against you. The themes of the neighborhood, children and nostalgia have always been at the center of the texts of Arcade Fire, but never as now have been exposed with such clarity and multisfaccettatura. One listen to " The Suburbs" is a trip to those places and hearts that once populated and popular now.
But in reality it is as if everything was just the feeling, the perception that people have of places, because nothing really changes in suburbia, and no one can escape from suburbia. The
suburbia is an infinite expanse ( Sprawl I & II) where before we build the roads and then the houses ( Month of May, Wasted Hours ) and spend more time to travel to places with an almost metaphysical ( Wasted Hours ) that actually do something, get bored a lot, you expect something will never, do not even know exactly what ( We Used To Wait ). So everything becomes something to play with, if you fancy (I & II Half Light ). But time passes relentlessly ( Deep Blue) and what remains now are the new arrogant, vulgar and mass of kids today ( Rococo ) and standardized ways of life that weigh us down ( Modern Man). Hope is not gone, there is still want to fall in love and procreate ( The Suburbs, Ready To Start ), but it is a hope empty because as I said before nothing changes really, there is no way to escape, and even children (always in perfect guardians of purity for the Arcade Fire) are marked. The only purity is that of "good" times of cycling in the neighborhood of the games created with anything, of first loves, but the weather has turned friends into strangers who fight in wars suburban ( Suburbian War ).
It is amazing how this maelstrom of ideas is in fact perfectly chiseled and organized: The title track is like the poster of the concept album, some issues are analyzed by a double and opposite view of themselves ( Half Light I & II, Sprawl I & II), the texts refer constantly to each other and everything is closed with an outro that takes the first track, as if to mark, to repeat, that there is no escape from suburbia EVER.
The Arcade Fire will also give many quotations, without ever being heavy (Eliot, Hemingway, the game Kasparov-Deep Blue chess, etc.) and from the sound point of view there are some new (a couple of songs with something electronic flavor slightly Editors area) in an album which for me is already sketched at the top of my favorite records of recent times.
RATING: 8 / 9
