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The sprawling terrain of suburban America has been mapped so many times that life out there begins to take on the qualities of myth.  However, the myth of life in suburbs is an inversion of traditional myths.  Instead of taking on epic qualities of bravery and cunning, the characters who float throughout suburban literature are presented as quiet, modest people who are the definitive representation of life in America.  The problem here, obviously, is that this kind of formulation of American life ignores the racial and ethnic diversity of our country.  However, like Nas’ Illmaticor The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken speak volumes about their respective social environments, the best suburban music can tell us something profound about a portion of our citizenry.

For the best 5 years, Arcade Fire have assumed up the mantle left by Cheever and Updike and chronicled the emotionally turbulent lives of children and parents in quiet subdivisions.  Funeral was an overwhelming masterpiece that tried to understand the haunting specter of death that awaits us at the end of the corridor of our lives.  Their follow-up album, Neon Bible, was a confrontation of that specter, an album that howled in death’s face with a near suicidal rage (“Intervention,” “Bad Vibrations”).  Now, after documenting our inevitable relationship with death, Arcade Fire have recorded an album that documents that brief flicker of light that shines between two eternally dark voids on either side of our lives.  Whereas Funeral andNeon Bible were about life in the face of death, The Suburbs is ostensibly the story of life in a deathless land.

For Arcade Fire, this is a land where “dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains.”  The suburbs are “a garden left for ruin.”  But instead of simply being a document about the deadening effects of life in the suburbs, the album is about our struggles to live ordinary lives in unremarkable places.  The album opens with the titular track, a sunny jaunt that belies the dark heart of the album’s ethos:  “I want a daughter while I’m still young/I wanna hold her hand/And show her some beauty/Before this damage is done.”  So much of the album concerns this push and pull between angry resentment and unrestrained sentimentality.  On “Suburban War,” when Win Butler sings that “the cities we live in could be distant stars,” you hear the disgust and resignation in his voice.  At other moments, though, you find quiet moments of triumph: “Wasted hours that you made new/And turned into/A life that we could live.”  Fear and boredom may dictate much of life in the suburbs, but there are moments of redemptive meaning.

Thematically, the dominant image on The Suburbs is of cars.  So many of Arcade Fire’s songs sound like a grand homage to the power of personal transportation (“Keep the Car Running,” “In the Backseat” “Virgin Mary Highway”).  This makes sense to those of us who grew up in suburbs: a car was your first opportunity to move outside the reach of your neighborhood, your town, your life.  The only way that you’re going to get out of the suburbs is in the front seat of a car speeding down the sun-bleached roads.  Butler seems to understand this all too well.  On “Suburban War,” he sings “In the suburbs, I learned to drive/You told me we would never survive/So grab your mother’s keys, we leave tonight.”  A car, for Butler, isn’t just about freedom; it’s a potent symbol of intention and livelihood.  Elsewhere, on “Sprawl (Flatland),” Butler inverts the car’s potent symbolism by using it as a vehicle to explore the anonymous towns that he abandoned:  “Took a drive into the sprawl/To find the places we used to play/It was the loneliest day of my life/You’re talking at me but I’m still far away.”

Arcade Fire’s impressive mis en scene is so complete that it’s too easy to get caught up in the band’s mythopoetics and ignore the fact that, first and foremost, they are a group of musicians writing songs.  The music that buoys Butler’s stories is lighter than than the occasionally ham-fisted instrumentation that colored Neon Bible.  Gone are the black curtains of organs and deep wells of bass.  In their place, Aracde Fire works with a much lighter touch:  snappy drums, warm guitar tones, understated basslines.  Much of the credit must be given to Markus Dravs, the man who produced Neon Bible.  Whereas Neon Bible needed darker tones to compliment the world-weary heaviness of the album, Dravs recognizes that The Suburbs does not necessarily need such an obvious correlative sound.

The best songs on the album (“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountais)” “Modern Man” “We Used to Wait”) sound like snappy new wave.  This is consistent with the personal disco that Arcade Fire perfected on “Neighborhoods #2 (Laika)” and the end of “Crown of Love.”  And elsewhere, we get the usual Arcade Fire bombast.  But instead of an overwhelming sense of dread, the band balances an edgy sense of reservation and relief.  The twin songs that sit in the middle of the album, “Half Light I” and “Half Light II (No Celebration)” are the most traditionally full Arcade Fire compositions.  “Half Light I” is guided by a gently swelling strings and a duet between Butler and Regina Chassagne.  Meanwhile, “Half Light II (No Celebration)” is driven forward with a thudding four-on-the-floor beat, but the yawning strings help the song stretch its wing and gain lift.  The album also features two of Arcade Fire’s fiercest workouts.  “Month of May” is a punkish rave-up featuring a urgently chugging guitar riff and a wonderfully harsh snap of the snare drum.  And “Empty Room” sounds like the most desperately angry chamber pop imaginable.  The roaring lead guitar that howls in the background explodes the crushing claustrophobia of the song.

Like the rural countryside and the urban ghetto, the racially homogenous suburbs have become an unlikely cultural epicenter of inspiration.  And like country and hip-hop, suburban indie rock works to confuse the boundaries between the personal and the political.  While the message of the album echoes Yates and Cheever’s diagnosis of the problems of suburban blight, it is still just as potent now as it was 60 years ago.  In the end, the question that The Suburbs asks is not “Just how bad is life among the white middle class?”  No, the question is more interesting than that: “Can we ever get away from the sprawl?”  The band provides a nuanced answer.  Yes, you can physically leave but you must understand that you will carry the memories, the scars, the boredom of that life with you forever.

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The ballsiest song in The Books‘ catalog, which is filled with ballsy songs, is “Motherless Bastard.”  The song opens with a horrifying field recording of a father denying that he is his little girl’s dad.  The upsetting dialogue suddenly gives way to a rustic duet between acoustic guitars.  The production is stellar, and the melodies are unabashedly gorgeous.  Now, on The Books’ latest song to leak from The Way Out, their forthcoming album from Temporary Residence, takes the same track, using some terrifying vocal samples from children.  One little boy vividly recounts the ways that he could kill you:  “I can kill you with a rifle, a shotgun, any way I want to.  Probably cutting your toes and working my up toward your brain.”  Yikes.  But underneath the violent imaginations of children, the duo have composed a fundamentally unsound beat that suddenly bursts with borrowed sounds: whistles, screams, harmonicas, electronic rushes, bird calls.  The whole sounds like it’s on the verge of collapse, and it’s a thrillingly unnerving listen.

myspace | myspace.com/thebooksmusicpage]]> http://www.indieshuffle.com/the-books-a-cold-freezin-night/feed/ 5 http://www.indieshuffle.com/preview-arcade-fire-the-suburbs/ http://www.indieshuffle.com/preview-arcade-fire-the-suburbs/#comments Tue, 08 Jun 2010 03:22:38 +0000 svotel http://www.indieshuffle.com/?p=8160

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Arcade Fire’s career is built on sensationally anthemic bombast, so the most striking thing about the two new songs from their forthcoming The Suburbs is that they are relatively modest affairs.  But, then again, almost anything after “Intervention” or “Keep the Car Running” or “No Cars Go” is going to sound modest. “The Suburbs” is a sunny affair that belies the dark lyrics: “But in my dreams, we’re still screaming and running through the yard/And all of the walls that they built in the seventies finally fall.”  Meanwhile, the claustrophobic new wave of “Month of May” is a pretty radical change for the band. Here, the band swaps the passion of their most carefully crafted songs for the urgency of a distorted guitar and the harsh snap of a snare.

myspace | myspace.com/arcadefireofficial]]> http://www.indieshuffle.com/preview-arcade-fire-the-suburbs/feed/ 4 http://www.indieshuffle.com/sunvisor-sky-dive/ http://www.indieshuffle.com/sunvisor-sky-dive/#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 02:52:49 +0000 svotel http://www.indieshuffle.com/?p=7993

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I’m a pretty loquacious guy; the blog has been great because I get to indulge in instantaneous editorials about whatever I’m really into at the moment.  But every now and then I come across a song that I really hits me and I have the damnedest time explaining what’s so great about it.

Take, for instance, Sunvisor’s “Sky Dive,” a song that I’ve been hanging out with pretty steadily since the duo sent it to me a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been struggling with my review because I can’t get much past a list of all of the things I like about the song:  the vague clang of the snare, the woozy synths, the way the gentle background vocals waft across the track, the way the bassline recedes as the layers pile up, the reverb blurring and smearing the vocals.  But it dawned on me tonight, when I sat down to work on it again, that I don’t need to make an argument for the song.  The song stands on its own.  Sometimes it’s best to shut the fuck up and let the song do all the talking.

myspace | myspace.com/sunvisormusic]]> http://www.indieshuffle.com/sunvisor-sky-dive/feed/ 0 http://www.indieshuffle.com/lcd-soundsystem-this-is-happening/ http://www.indieshuffle.com/lcd-soundsystem-this-is-happening/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:46:22 +0000 svotel http://www.indieshuffle.com/?p=7285

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Sounds like: Liquid Liquid, Kraftwerk, The Juan MacLean, ESG

But James Murphy knows what he wants. He arrived fully formed 8 years ago with a string of singles (“Losing My Edge,” “Give It Up,” “Yeah,” “Movement”) so good that his debut record already sounded like a greatest hits package. And now, after having recorded what is arguably the greatest song of the decade, LCD Soundsystem is back with “This is Happening”. The terrific success of “Sound of Silver” only invited unreasonable expectations. The most immediate question is whether there is anything as good as “All My Friends” on the album. Of course not. But if/when there’s a follow up to This is Happening, we will invariably ask if it has anything as good as “Dance Yrself Clean” on it. This is Happening succeeds precisely because Murphy understands the logic of success: don’t ever try to surpass your previous achievements, simply make new ones.

This is Happening is a high water mark for LCD Soundsystem. Whereas the previous two albums frequently sounded like great song collections, This is Happening sounds like a great album. From the opening stunner “Dance Yrself Clean” to the final salvo that is “Home,” the album is a beautifully sequenced emotional travelogue through modern masculine consciousness. The emotional dynamic of the album, then, tends to look like the cardiogram of a heart attack patient. Even LCD’s party anthems have a resonate twinge of melancholy to them. Take the lead single, “Drunk Girls,” for example. After a punchy back and forth comparison between drunk boys and drunk girls, Murphy reaches the song’s climax by plainly asking, “Just be honest with me/Honestly/Honestly/Unless it hurts, why do it?” Elsewhere, on the classically funky “Pow Pow,” Murphy rants about the kids these days: “Your time will come, but tonight is our night, so you should give us all your drugs.” But the song’s cheery playfulness is threatened by some nasty glances in the mirror: “I’m paralyzed and looking through you/But if nothing’s right, we try anyway.” Murphy’s ability to piss on his own parade makes him an endearing and rare figure in a world of inhumanely calculated personas.

LCD Soundsystem has always been at their most potent when Murphy examines the emotional tectonics shifting underneath the cool swagger of his sleek disco. And it’s these moments that are the highlights on This is Happening. The motorik beat of “All I Want” carries Murphy along as he admits that all he wants is your pity. But instead of sounding pathetic, it comes across as a triumph of honesty. Murphy has never been one to pull punches aimed at his own reflection, and “I Can Change” picks up essentially where the galaxy of spaced-out synths leaves him at the end of “All I Want.” But “I Can Change” is even more bracingly honest: “I can change/If it helps you fall in love.” The song is about blindly sacrificing yourself for attention and affection, a dirty little secret that props up relationships. The album’s bookends will (and rightly should) garner the most attention. Both songs center on the redemptive possibilities of a good night out. On “Home,” the album’s closer, Murphy whips up the kind of melancholic disco shuffle that the band has been perfecting the whole album. The song is full of well-earned lines of devastating verse: “And this is what you waited for/But under the lights, we’re all unsure/So tell me/What would make you feel better?” And then there’s “Dance Yrself Clean,” the album’s opening end-all-be-all masterpiece. Murphy understands that our best moments tend to throw our worst fears into stark relief. After all, we seek these moments to escape the doubt and the regret that crouches low in our minds in the small hours of the morning. The act of going out to a club, then, becomes a ritual, a ceremony, a group therapy session, a moment of redemption and happiness. A moment when you can get away from it all, while simultaneously realizing exactly what we’re escaping.

Among the thousand other things that This is Happening demonstrates, the album is deft in its ability to show you that the endless chase for innovation is a ridiculous pursuit. LCD Soundsystem never tried to prove that they were anything more than a clever mash-up of Neu! and Kraftwerk and Liquid Liquid. This is Happening doesn’t change any of that because it doesn’t have to. New songs that sound like old songs are the most innovative trick anyone’s pulled in years.

Elsewhere on the Web:
myspace | myspace.com/lcdsoundsystem