Why I like the Arcade Fire

Win Butler and his brother Will grew up in the Woodlands, Texas. It is a relatively new and “master planned” community about half an hour north of Houston. The planners behind the Woodlands didn’t invent the suburbs, but in 1974 founder George Mitchell perfected them. It’s nearly 25 square miles of perfect tree-lined streets. Behind the tall pines are hidden the houses and McMansions, schools, shops, stores, Fortune 500 companies, and one of the largest shopping malls in the country. The Woodlands covers everything with a thin layer of forest to disguise the necessary structures and veins every other community leaves to decay right out in the open.

And now these two brothers are in the Arcade Fire, a famous (and reportedly Canadian) rock band whose debut and sophomore records have sold nearly 500,000 copies. Each. Their third album debuted at #1 in both the US and the UK. It’s called The Suburbs. I was eager to hear the record, not only because I enjoyed the first two Arcade Fire records. But also because, like the Butlers, I’m a 30-something musician who grew up in the suburbs of North Houston. And I’m about to put out my third record. And I’ve also written several songs about or inspired by the Suburbs, which for whatever reason, are not often counted as complex subjects for important-sounding rock musics like mine. And Win Butler’s.

I kid, but not really. I mean, I really have written a bunch of songs about what the Suburbs did to me and what I did to them. And very simply, I celebrate the Arcade Fire because they make the kind of music I would like to make. That, in some ways, I’ve been trying to make and have been making for years. A different me might have been bored and offended at their obvious lyrics. Their bombastic hymns. Their portentious subject matter. The pretentious orchestral flourishes. Their earnest attempts to make serious music that unironically borrows its tropes from the conservative side of classic arena rock.

But unlike most of my local scenester pals, consumed with Noise and Smoke as they are, Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs is precisely the kind of music I would strive to make with an equivalent amount of talent and money (and to be clear, I come up well short on both fronts). So yeah, it would be hard to take a stand against a band for writing a bunch of mid-tempo, piano-infused ballads about hopeless kids roaming the darkened suburbs. When my own “Summer Kids”, which I wrote in the 90s, basically takes on the same instrumentation and themes. And I have probably 15 to 20 more songs covering similar ground (note: fellow NAP-er Josh plays bass and piano on this).

Chasmatic – Summer Kids

But I will not limit the comparison to myself. Arcade Fire are actually a lot better than most bands working today. Certainly they are better than the multitude of “indie” bands who are currently trying to do the same thing Arcade Fire does. That includes unlistenable crap like Frightened Rabbit, Okkervil River, and The Gaslight Anthem. But it also includes bands I’ve respected and enjoyed for years: The National. The New Pornographers. More recent records by Spoon and Wilco and the Hold Steady. I can understand not liking Arcade Fire if you’re heavy into rap or dancepop or noise or psych. But if you occasionally make time for any of NPR’s stable of whiteboy adult contemporary heroes, you can’t do much better than Arcade Fire.  They didn’t invent mild-mannered indie rock or dad rock. But they’ve perfected it. And if you can’t get into it, you’re probably like Danny: you’re not wasting a lot of time on any of the Fire-bands or the lesser brands of indie-lite. Again, it’s hard for me to get away with that, since writing classic-rock-derived white-boy indie musics is what I do and have always done.

I had planned to write a long review of the new record, but this has been ably done elsewhere. I agree with broad portions of the Pitchfork and New York Times pieces I read. Instead, I think I’ll just share a few bits about why I like the band and the record so much.

Direct lyrics, and songs that are about things and feelings. This is not to say the lyrics aren’t poetic and multi-layered and writerly. They are pretty damned clever a lot of the time. Sometimes they cross over into being pretentious and precious. But Arcade Fire songs aren’t like Spoon or Pavement or Guided By Voices. These songs aren’t impressionistic tone pieces built on one or two killer lines and protected by obscurity. Arcade Fire songs have narrative and thematic cohesion, which they typically sustain over an entire record. And you know—everyone knows—what they’re singing about. That’s why its possible to say that Funeral is about Death, Neon Bible is about Religion and The Suburbs is about…well, you know.

Musicianship that’s smarter and more complex than it sounds. The new record dials it back a bit on the anthems and grandeur for which Arcade Fire is known. The music has become both flatter and more conventional to match its titular subject matter. And yet, they don’t just pound out the chords in 4/4. The songs sound catchy and simple, but there’s an awful lot of interesting crap going on. The first single, “Ready to Start” is a good example, as the band introduces three different guitar hooks in the first few seconds that all join up to ground the verse. And “Modern Man” has already become well known for the confusion its Rick Springfield riff has caused because the people clapping at the show get confused by the odd shift in time. By the time they figure it out the song has already resolved itself. Nearly half the songs features similar shifts in time and texture, and most are seamless. I’d do a better job here if I knew how to technically describe the cool tricks Arcade Fire regularly insert into their pop songs. But it’s in there. Maybe Josh can explain.

Craft. I’ve seen the “Modern Man” story enough that it was probably included in the press kit (which I’ve not seen). But here’s something none of the reviews pointed out. Butler chose a hiccupping riff and weird time shift in the same song where he sings “something don’t feel right / like a record that’s skipping / I’m a Modern Man … in line for a number / but you don’t understand.” Later, in “We Used to Wait”, he there’s a tension between the rushed repetition in the dual bridges and the longer instrumental breaks that lead into and out of the chorus. And I love the way Rococo’s spooky chorus embodies the cultural group think of the sophisticated alterna-teens he’s mocking. The music is listening to the lyrics and vice versa. Your mileage may vary, but Arcade Fire puts a showtunes level of craft and thought into their work. Pretentious? Certainly. But they work their asses off to earn it.

Great synths. Most bands today use synths to add fake strings and horns or emulate piano and organ. If they use them at all. Sometimes there’s a one-dimensional attempt to reference disco or new-wave. Arcade Fire use multiple layers of synths the way that Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, and Talking Heads did. The synth hooks are central to the songs, woven into the guitars and bass and drums like an equal partner. And the strings are real (supplied by bad ass Owen Pallet along with two multi-instrumentalist Arcade Fire members).

A firm rejection of niches and genres and brands in favor of being a BIG ROCK BAND. I said I’d tell you what I thought the Suburbs was about. First, I agree with many of the reviews that bluntly state The Suburbs is about what Win Butler says its about: His journey back to Houston to revisit the place where he grew up, and his rapidly fading/changing memories of it. I also agree that the portrait is more complex than you’d expect, with Butler not trying to condemn the place, so much as convey it. I listen to it, and I’m there again, walking alone like Ray Bradbury’s Pedestrian among the drones and uniform houses lit with flickering screens. But the suburbs in the summer meant kids were also venturing through the darkness together. Looking for something to do and to drink. And Butler wistfully remembers the contradictions of feeling so safe and so empty, yet adventurous and cinematic. He rails against The Sprawl but then thinks about raising his own future daughter there so she can share in its “beauty.”

But the Suburbs could also be about rock music and where it’s gone. Namely, it’s scattered everywhere into a sprawl of genres. Chill waves. Scenes. Cores. Lyrically, there’s a metaphorical war all over The Suburbs, with the kids (or bands) dividing themselves into neighborhoods and brand affiliations. All competing for the same privileged, fickle, college-aged twentysomethings, their allegiance, and whatever disposable cash they’ve wrangled from their folks and their student loans. The lyrics don’t always work for me, but I think I see what they’re getting at.

The Suburbs can be read as a rumination on how difficult it is today to sustain a career in today’s fragmented, cash-poor, digital-driven, ADD-addled music industry. Now we live in the “shadows of songs”. We’re not listening to great rock bands anymore. We don’t even hear bands trying to be great. Bands are hoping to put their content-free ringtone-length bits into the NPR breaks or commercials. Or they’re becoming ever more “experimental”, a word which rock ‘n’ roll bands should probably stop using.

I hear The Suburbs as coming from a band whose turn toward more conservative/traditional-sounding classic rock isn’t as safe a move as it seems. This band isn’t just referencing The Boss and U2 and Peter Gabriel and The Talking Heads as pastiche. In their wry, updated disco version of “Road to Nowhere” (“Sprawl II”, the album’s best track), they’re recalling a time when ambitious bands didn’t concede the pop charts, and didn’t concede whole genres of music to other bands. They’re trying to be the same size as those bands when the realities of the industry suggests it can’t be done. And they’re doing it without the goofy modesty of Coldplay.

Arcade Fire don’t want to be in a genre. They want contain genres. They freaking want to be huge. And in this way they aren’t unlike Radiohead or Kanye West. I think that’s why I like them. When I was a kid I wanted to be a rock star. I didn’t daydream about trying to play SXSW nine times and sleeping on the floor after driving all day in van. But that’s the reality for most bands. And that’s a reality I’ve not been willing to take on for myself. But Arcade Fire fought through that phase leading up to Funeral. And they blasted past it. Driving themselves around the country wasn’t their goal. They just played a two-night stint at Madison Square Garden, and had Terry Gilliam direct a live performance film. They dream big and play big. And unlike most bands, they worked their asses off getting both the content and performance to the level where it needed to be to make that happen.

So many bands/kids are presenting ironic/self-aware/deconstructed commentary as actual music. I like the Arcade Fire because they have the courage to construct something huge and ambitious and classic and unironic and to expect an audience for their troubles. I have quibbles with the execution sometimes, but I respect them because, well, they’ve pulled it off.