Arcade Fire

The new Arcade Fire album is a portrait of suburban malaise that fuses singer-songwriter sensitivity, social critique, and anthemic arena rock. If Bright Eyes, Bono, and Bruce Springsteen ever got together, they might make a record like The Suburbs.

Last night, Arcade Fire brought their singalong, clap-along frenzy to New York’s Madison Square Garden. The nine-piece band played hits from their first two records, Funeral and Neon Bible, and debuted tracks from The Suburbs, which may take the #1 spot on next week’s Billboard charts.

Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

The show opened with “Ready to Start,” energized by two drummers, before they settled into older material, with which they and the crowd seemed more at ease. Frontman Win Butler switched between guitar, piano and mandolin and praised MSG as the place where Hakeem Olajuwon blocked a shot that led the Houston Rockets to victory over the Knicks in the 1994 NBA finals.  (Fun fact: Butler played varsity hoops at Philips Exeter Academy).

Arcade Fire, Ready to Start

His wife, Régine Chassagne, rotated between accordian, keyboards, and percussion, and took her star turn with the penultimate song, “Sprawl II,” which sounds like a reincarnation of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” As she sang,  Chassagne waved flourescent streamers and twirled in a sparkly skirt. Throughout, the rhythm section and string section added texture, volume, and energy to a show that ended near midnight with the anthem “Wake Up.”

Arcade Fire, Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

Despite the title, The Suburbs is not only about the suburbs. Cities appear in many songs, though there’s no mention of Montreal, the band’s home base. Instead, the cities are nameless or American. Ultimately,  Arcade Fire takes an ambivalent stand on suburbia, exploring the tensions found in the postwar fiction of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and John Updike, and revived in today’s Mad Men mania. Sure, the burbs are plagued with car culture and malls that sprawl like “mountains beyond mountains.” But in these songs, suburbia also stands for youth and all its innocence and foolishness and purity.

The ambivalence extends to “kids,” a word that recurs throughout The Suburbs. “Modern kids” are poseurs who use big words to sound cool. Yet kids represent innocence and hope for the future. As Butler sings on the title track: “I want a daughter while I’m still young/I want to hold her hand/Show her some beauty/Before the damage is done.”  This damage gets airtime on tracks like “Modern Man,” which updates the kind of social satire that made the Kinks the godfathers of indie rock. And when Butler, who turned 30 this year, sings about feeling like he lives in a city with no children, it’s a lament, not a fantasy.

Arcade Fire, City With No Children

If the songs on The Suburbs stick in your brain, blame the relentless repetition. Nearly every song hinges on a repeated note, phrase, or rhythm. The band’s use of ostinato ranges from punk rock guitar (“Month of May”) to a string section flurry (“Empty Room”), from a farty New Wave bass groove (“Sprawl II”) to piano that sounds like Chopsticks or LCD Soundsystem (“We Used to Wait”).

Arcade Fire, Month of May

Arcade Fire also loves to repeat words.  The Suburbs has two tracks called “Half-Light” and two called “Sprawl;” both  pairs occur back to back.  The technique recalls Funeral, which has four different songs titled “Neighborhood.” Not unlike a Broadway musical, The Suburbs is bookended by the title track and a reprisal. And lyrically, the album repeatedly refers to youth, modernity, and wasted time, with words and phrase that hammer home the themes of nostalgia and despair.

Arcade Fire still act like indie nerds, as evidenced by a new song that name checks Deep Blue, the chess computer that beat Gary Kasparov. But The Suburbs, last night’s show, movies in the works with Terry Gilliam and Spike Jonze, and fund-raising for Haiti all suggest a move toward rock stardom. The funerals are over. The bible is closed. Now they’re ready to start.

Arcade Fire plays again at Madison Square Garden tonight (August 5) with Spoon and Owen Pallett, then continues their summer and fall tour in America, Canada, and Europe.