It's a pretty head-spinning premise to first lay down:  We live in a world of fabrication, of fake realities.  We build social networks around the semblance of real communication.  We spend time in recreated diners, renovated buildings, and hang reproduced art in our homes and offices.  We watch television and succumb to the deliciousness of reality TV.  Two weeks ago, I visited the Holocaust Museum in DC for the first time, and one of the most unnerving moments was passing underneath the exact replica casting of the gates of Auschwitz.  I wasn't, in fact, passing under the REAL gates of Auschwitz, but instead a representation of them. Is this problematic?  An Italian writer, Umberto Eco, in "The City of Robots," Travels in Hyperreality, spoke about simulacrum indirectly,  which is the idea that when we recreate things, our new creation will lack the sustainable qualities of the original.  We strive to create and sustain the nuances or beauty of the orignal, but in doing so, ultimately distort and slough them off, making our representation, perhaps, entirely different than it was in the first place. Kind of like, Picasso couldn't have repainted Guernica because it would have sucked. Eco believed that we are economically driven by this premise at a dangerous cost.  We live in a world of wax museums, Don Pablos, That 70's Show, Best Coast, and Disneyland.  We spend dollars chasing these distorted representations of what we believe reality to be.  Hell, even Klosterman alluded to it in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs when discussing the difference between Survivor and Saved By the Bell.  The latter was so obnoxiously fake that it was real.  The former, on the other hand, is a fake representation, and ultimately, more alarmingly inaccurate than Saved by the Bell ever could have been.  This is why I listened to NWA as a kid and enjoyed Great White.  I lived in about as suburban an area as humanly possible, and it was just plain dull.  If you catch me on the right day, however, I'll give you a full fledged simulacrum, and speak about the sprinklers in the yard, skinning my knees on concrete, and the bliss of my first adolescent kiss.  This theme works in two ways with Arcade Fire's The Suburbs.  First of all, if anyone expects another Funeral it is a disservice to the concept of art itself and the original power of that record.  If we're to assume that recreations are inherently BAD, then we should never expect a band to strive to reproduce a replica.  Secondly, and more importantly, is that this album is special because it speaks to an audience of ME, and there are millions of me's out there wandering around.  We live on facebook, we sprawl out in fake cities and wander around in capitol buildings made to look like the Parthenon, and wonder why in the fuck we are aimless rolling out of a suburban childhood. The Butlers have simply created a masterpiece here both lyrically and stylistically, soaring into their textbook formulaic approach to chill-inducing audio.  In choosing to write about their suburban childhood in Houston, Arcade Fire has panned loads of gold, and we're left to reap the benefits.  The unfortunate and also endearing thing is that nothing Butler pines about is actually real.  I think he understands that, which makes this album great as opposed to really, really good.

I suppose there are two ways to look at a suburban upbringing.  One is with all the distorted and made up nostalgia we build out of our desire to need to attach ourselves to something important.  The other way, perhaps, is to look back with disdain, and understand that suburban life is inherently a simulacrum, or a cat chasing its own tail, constantly hunting for depth and value in a sea of false, economic realities.  What makes this album soar is that, lyrically, the speaker is always battling both of these ideas but never really reaching any sort of conclusion. In creating a more boring Holden Caulfield, Butler opens up an entirely relatable cataloging of images in the album's opener, "The Suburbs," with lazy nonchalance vocally and a retro-50's feel that hearkens back to the easy and mundane, the maltshops and diners of, I'd suspect, an average suburb anywhere in mid 1970's america.  Most of the early 50's nostalgia, by this time, was probably crumbling away.  Sometimes I like to think about my suburban childhood as pristine, like I was always told the early 50's were.  Cleverly, the album begins where it should probably end, with a speaker who's pretty much identified that his own childhood was a drag, in that they "were already bored," and seem to be "moving past the feeling, and into the night." At the opener's close, listeners are already aware of the two things pulling at the speaker.  He seems to want desparately to fall into the bubble gummish fake realities of suburban nostalgia, but also knows that he's been modernized and the only reality is full speed ahead because, "it's already, already passed."

This theme weaves its way through nearly every track of the album with a loose cohesion, leaving listeners with nuggets that stick in the craw. Whether it's "Ready to Start's," pining what ifs and uncertainty, or the heavily nostaligic recollection of childhood envy and boredom in "Rococo," the push and pull of looking forward versus backward continually bubbles to the top.  In "City with No Children," Butler suggests, "I feel like I've been living in a city with no children in it, a garland left for ruin by and by, as I, hide inside, of my private prison," furthering the struggle people have leaving childhood.  The "City with No Children" isn't Salinger's fields of rye, but it's easy to hear the echoes.  For Butler (or the speaker), I think the ultimate end is to realize that most of our recollections of growing up (especially those of us in the commercially generic suburbs), are essentially recreated fantasies about what we hope that reality was when it occurred.  The real reality and value occurs when we live in the now.  What a watershed moment when one realizes that his entire childhood was commercial bullshit and all of his deepest memories could, in fact, be inaccurately represented in his mind.  "Modern Man" presents this realization as completely jarring, as he waits in line, feeling savvy, but disconnected to all of the people behind him. The suburban myth, it seems, is entirely commercial, and breeds a society of people who misperceive their own place in the world.  "I know we are the chosen few but we waste it, and that's why we're still waiting."  This modern man is confused and although he's isolated himself from everyone else around him, he still can't sleep at night.  The next song, "Rococo," is about as cathartic as can be, and reverts back to childhood where they desparately wanted to admire the "modern kids."  The last two-minute segment of this track buckles me each and every time I listen.

Perhaps the album's strongest statement lyrically (and sonically, as well) is in "Suburban War," where anger sets in and the war between suburban largeness and human pawn is waged over the real significance of childhood memories and settings. The song chronicles that sad passage of time and the inevitability of change from adolescence to adulthood in modern America.  The song lulls at one second, and soars to spine-chilling highs the next, matching the lyrical back and forth between regret and acceptance. "The music dvides.  Us into tribes.  You choose your side and I'll choose mine." How suburban, eh?  The speaker's old friends don't even know who he is, but there's not a clear picture of whether or not he is angered over this.  It merely is.  Not only do we recreate nostalgia to place our histories in their most positive light, but we also have no choice even if we wanted to reverse that idea. The commercialization and "billionaires" of society have "built it to change." We (suburban youngsters) are products of a culture that divides economically, musically, and socially.

Musically, 16 songs range from whimsically divergent to searingly intense, and race listeners through a complete amalgamation of everything that was excellent in Funeral and the Neon Bible.  Other reviews have alluded to the album's length, but the sheer volume of the album points to the emotional sincerity of the band's effort.  There's not one unneccessary moment on the record.  A weighty lyrical concept requires room to breath, and Arcade Fire controls the oxygen, predictably taking it away at times. The Sprawl I and II duo is incredibly shifting from one musical decade to the next.  The theatrically ominous "Sprawl I (Flatland)" is introspective and brooding, entirely indie and endearing.  Minor chord progressions and Butler's crystal clear vocal delivery resemble a Broadway musical interlude.  As soon as listeners settle into the vibe, the incredibly infectious, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Moutains) whips in with a better-than-Blondie Blondie track, synthesizer flourishes tightly compacted to near perfection.  Regine's crooning represents some sort of awakening in the album, and the sound pushes this forward.  The corporational stranglehood is clear here, but acceptance has taken grasp as she "wonders if the world's so small that we can never get away from the sprawl."  Shopping malls, consumerism, recollection, and eye-popping light all present themselves in the true pop haymaker of the album.  In short (if you've made it this far), Arcade Fire sticks with their proven formula, but does so with more emotional sincerity and complexity with The Suburbs. The emphasis on rhythmic singular note guitars and the kitchen-sink of instrumentation everything is the key that works.  There is simply not an ounce of filler on this album, and the songs saturate even further on each subsequent listen.

What separates great bands from really good bands is, at least partly, adaptability and the connection they maintain with their audience throughout multiple successful albums.  To some, the complexity of Neon Bible was too much, and I suppose that many will expect every single Arcade Fire album to line up with Funeral, but this is, as mentioned, dangerous.  Replicas are always of poorer quality, and The Suburbs is, by all counts, a stand-alone effort of largeness and epic scope that will sit on your record shelves for as long as you have shelving units in your house. This record is my experience.  It conjures my fears and my aging restlessness.  It makes me shake my ass, pump my fists, and weep just as easily.  We grow up entirely naive and as we mature, those naive and mundane moments are held so dear that we recreate them, almost to a fault, but we recreate them through the lenses of the suburban corporate life we have no choice but to be stuck in.  Ultimately, orginality is only found in the present, and anything else is false and inconsequential. Although the record is about the distorted realities, insignificance of our memories, and the importance of progress, the mere fact that Butler and crew get it is what relates to me on so many levels.  On one spin you can crank this up and forget about all the complexity, but digging deeply into the album's core will leave you with something special.

Enjoy one track from Funeral, one track from Neon Bible, and The Suburbs Sampler below…

Arcade Fire – Rebellion (Lies)

Arcade Fire – Keep The Car Running