Arcade Fire The Suburbs

Arcade Fire's The Suburbs has been out for a little while now; and I got it for Christmas so I've had a chance to listen to it more than once. With this little distance and a little familiarity, I've been able to make the following evaluation of the album:

It is thoroughly listenable.

I bet "Empty Room," "Rococo," and "Sprawl II" sound awesome live.

The actual song "The Suburbs" is charming enough on its own; it's probably a shame they had to waste an album title on it.

Then there's a bunch of other tracks that are, well...Not bad. At least not wincingly, cringe-worthy bad. Just listenable. Thoroughly listenable, even.

But not quite the religious experiences of Funeral and Neon Bible.

Frankly, it sounds like an album produced by a band starting to buy too much into its own pretentiousness.

Before I go farther, let me here state that pretentiousness is not necessarily a bad thing:

It takes a certain level of pretentiousness (that is, a certain over-inflated belief in one's own talent and/or importance), to go to all the trouble of forming a 7-piece indie-rock band, complete with violinists, multi-instrumentalists on organ, glockenspiel, hurdy-gurdy, etc.

It takes a certain amount of pretentiousness to sincerely write, believe in, and pull off an anthem like "Wake Up."

It takes more than a dash of pretentiousness to rent out an old Church and record Neon Bible.

For that matter, it takes more than a little pretentiousness to record Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Joshua Tree, or Dark Side of the Moon.

Pink Floyd might in fact be my easiest point of reference for Arcade Fire--for Pink Floyd's The Wall, like The Suburbs, is a thematically-unified, sprawling album reaching for grander themes. Both albums contain a number of legitimately enjoyable songs, sadly couched in much more forgettable fair. Also, both works are much-hyped later period works, produced long after the better work both bands will primarily be remembered for.

For that's the two-edged sword of pretentiousness: When a band believes a little too highly of itself, pretentiousness can still be a positive force for driving the band to try and meet its own self-imposed expectations.

As much as I love REM, they were never going to produce The Joshua Tree; Pink Floyd alone, not some folk-singer or punk-band, had the chutzpa to make Dark Side of the Moon sync with the first 40 minutes of Wizard of Oz; and honestly, only the Beatles--not the Monkees--had the self-confidence to execute Sgt. Pepper.

But if that pretentiousness starts to get out of control--that is, when the pretentiousness becomes an end unto itself, and not a means to an end--that's when problems begin:

The Beatles start filming the atrocious TV special "Magical Mystery Tour," then let their egos get too big for the band;

U2 follows up Joshua Tree with the wincingly self-aggrandizing Rattle and Hum--and keep releasing music a solid decade after their last decent album;

and Pink Floyd releases, well, The Wall.

Not that it's a bad double-album. Just that it could've easily been a solid single album. All I'm saying.

And I'm convinced that the same 10-11 song restriction that kept Funeral and Neon Bible tight could have been of equal benefit to The Suburbs.

And I don't know, maybe the members of Arcade Fire are fully aware of the pretentiousness that drives their band; after all, the opening line to the album's big finale, "Sprawl II," is "They heard me singing and they told me to stop/Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock."

That same refusal to be afraid of being pretentious, that fearlessness, that willingness to look a little silly sometimes, is probably what has kept them going all this time.

Maybe we'd all (maybe I) would get more impressive things done, if we were all willing to look a little ridiculously pretentious now and again, if we tried to live up to our own overly-high expectations in an over-blown manner.

For as much as I love these genres, no folk-singer or punk-band is ever going to record something like "Wake Up."

But nor are they ever going to record The Wall.

Or The Suburbs.

The price we pay, I suppose.