The Suburbs

Even on a cursory listen, a water-testing foray into its 16 tracks, it's immediately apparent that this is an album unlike either that came before it.

It's common for heavily hyped albums to fall flat, but Arcade Fire's long-anticipated third LP hits with the satisfied thud of met potential.

Whatever it is, The Suburbs is nothing short of extraordinary; it's Arcade Fire's moment of clarity where everyone can stop and take notice because in the most frank of terms, this is also nothing short of a masterpiece.

For all the over-arching themes, The Suburbs is the most rocking Arcade Fire album yet.

With beats this straight and stolid, you'd better keep the anthems coming, and they do, almost.

Butler and company imbue The Suburbs with such a strong sense of place and mood that it builds in impact throughout.

Perhaps taking a cue from another seminal band, Talking Heads, The Suburbs is a more restrained, tempered affair. Yet the beat of their bleeding heart still remains...

The band certainly aims for transcendence on The Suburbs--a work of impressively fervent majesty.

The Suburbs is a really good record, but it's clear that indie rock is not in Kansas anymore.

One of the 21st century's most intelligent and satisfying bands (musically, lyrically, emotionally) have once again set out their stall, and once again produced a work of inspired resonance, capturing truth after truth, in all its muddled, human realism.

The Suburbs isn't anything as simple as back to basics--they're a much more accomplished, musically interesting band now.

Three years later, they've given us The Suburbs, a stunningly accomplished album about embattled, often embittered, adulthood by a band that continues to mythologize childhood even as it moves decisively into artistic maturity.

Trying to put The Suburbs in historical context at this stage is difficult, but it evokes Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation in its evocation of political discontent coupled with sheer white noise outbursts.

The tunes are among the most musically diverse the band has recorded so far, with buoyant piano pop undercut by an air of melancholy on the opening title track, glittering beds of synthesizers on "Sprawl II," churning, punk simplicity in the guitars on "Month of May" and a propulsive rhythm driving "Half Light II (No Celebration)," layers of vocal harmonies and moaning strings floating atop the relentless beat.

You barely detect it at first, but something miraculous happens on Arcade Fire's revelatory third album. The songs breathe--occasionally in long exhales, sometimes in staccato gasps.

The Suburbs is about a search for home, for a place in the world when the home you knew is gone.

Further proof that The Arcade Fire may indeed be the best band on the planet.

Radiant with apocalyptic tension and grasping to sustain real bonds, The Suburbs extends hungrily outward, recalling the dystopic miasma of William Gibson's sci-fi novels and Sonic Youth's guitar odysseys.

Though it is lengthy and a lot to sit through--more than 70 minutes of music--there seems little reason to think this won't catapult Arcade Fire to even greater heights.

The Suburbs is an accomplished love letter that radiates affection as much as bitterness.

Even more so than its two predecessors, The Suburbs is an Arcade Fire album designed to be heard as a whole in a specific sequence.

At 16 tracks, this dense, complicated set covers considerably more stylistic territory than either of the band's previous albums.

The bulk of The Suburbs focuses on this quiet desperation borne of compounding the pain of wasting your time as an adult by romanticizing the wasted time of your youth.

It's a staid achievement-a soundtrack to unwillingly letting go of the unsustainable, both figurative and literal.

Swelling at 16 songs and an hour-plus runtime, it's Arcade Fire's most ambitious and concept-driven effort to date.

It's serious without being preachy, cynical without dissolving into apathy, and whimsical enough to keep both sentiments in line, and of all of their records, it may be the one that ages so well.

For all its intimations of rootless drift, The Suburbs finds Arcade Fire back home, and so much happier for it. [Sep 20110, p.90]

There's a glorious new depth to the old formula here showcasing undeniable talent.

On The Suburbs, their third album, Arcade Fire sound more like a band than ever before.

It seems semi-impossible for Montreal's held-in-holy-regard Arcade Fire to top their previous two albums, but with The Suburbs they seem to have at least met their own standard.

The Suburbs ends on a dark, dystopian note with a little 90-second deconstruction of the title track, leaving you to wonder if the "screaming" alluded to earlier might not always be the joyful kind. That kind of ambiguity is what makes Arcade Fire's deceptively simple music all the more intriguing.

In a nutshell, The Suburbs' two most important achievement are to a) be good and b) not be a rehash of its predecessors.

How can any young band evolve toward that full-grown third album after starting out with a meditation on death and grief? It's no problem for Arcade Fire--these Montreal indie rockers are not shy about gunning for a solemn, grandiose, three-hankie anthem every time out.

The music on The Suburbs is as direct and straightforward as Butler's lyrics.

There's something charming about the way an album about growing up in the suburban 80s gradually starts to resemble a chart rundown from 1983: the taut, post-new wave rock track, the mournful social-realist ballad, the glittering synth-pop masterpiece.

If Funeral was organic, and Neon Bible was force-fed, The Suburbs makes do with being merely delicious. (And a little wistful, wounded, and wise.) [Sep 2010, p.80]

It's likely to be a defining point in their career even if it's not their definitive release.

With The Suburbs, the baroque pop outfit attempts to reconcile its past and present.