Seven Red

So the book goes like this: if you’re into anything Indie music-wise, you must go out and buy the Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs. It’s like a requirement, the analogy being if you’re into contemporary fiction, you have to go out and buy Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (the review in the New York Times this morning was syrupy, to say the least). So I dutifully did that. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Funeral is a great album, and I think Neon Bible is a good album, despite moments of painful and pedantic preciousness (see, for example, “Antichrist Television Blues”). But I thought I’d listen to The Suburbs with a kind of grimace. In my business, we call this a “mildly hostile audience.”

I also had to buy the album because of the in-your-face nostalgia with which the band promoted it. In this New York Times story, they essentially give the old fuck you to the flailing and smug nonsense promoted by New Media peoples about the fate of the album itself. True, they fall back into the other nonsense promoted by so many leftists, that if only we made “real things” anymore, we wouldn’t have all these problems:

“We recorded it on tape, we press it to vinyl, and the digital is the archive of this physical thing that exists in the world,” Mr. Butler said. “We’re preserving it and using digital as a mode of distribution, but ultimately there was something real that was made.”

I’ve about had it with both positions. On the one hand, you have these purveyors of the New, who hawk neoliberal claptrap as if it’s radical philosophy. On the other, you have wacked out old Labor hands pretending that the production of physical commodities was some kind of Utopian exercise. That said, as I noted in this post, I’m well ready to see a little push-back on the now prevalent position that the mode of distribution automatically transforms the genre of the LP, even if it’s a rearguard action, ultimately. So off I trundled to iTunes to make my stand for commodity production in the old style. Summary: mildly hostile audience.

I’m ready to admit it. I’ve listened to The Suburbs for two weeks now. It is a brilliant album. A desert island album, really. It’s The Queen is Dead, which suggests we’ll still have something like a Strangeways Here We Come out of Arcade Fire, and that’s no mean feat. The tempos great. There are at least 8 great songs, and the rest are at good to very good. “Empty Room,” “City with No Children” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” are revelations. They return to a theme (a fucking theme!).  There’s a moment in the middle of the record, in “Half Light II,” where the lyric goes something like “pray to God I won’t live to see the death of everything that’s wild,” and then we get this utterly unexpected “Woo!” And it’s the moment that crystallizes the record for me. It’s fucking smart. And good. And it’s an album, cohesive as an  LP without being a concept record. And I want to punch myself for saying it, because I want to drop snide remarks and say, “Oh, fucking Arcade Fire, whatever.” But I can’t, because they made a brilliant record.

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