Music Review: Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

The suburbs: characterless, soul-crushing, boring – the kid that grows up there dreams only of one day moving to the big city. A place to pine to escape from, curse your parents for making you live in and spend the majority of your free time day-dreaming about getting out of. Time stands still, hours last forever but it’s still your home, it’s what you know and it shapes you, no matter how hard you try to shake it off.

"The Suburbs" captures this paradox beautifully; inspired by key band members Win and Will Butler’s upbringing in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. Win describes it as sounding like “Depeche Mode meets Neil Young”, which isn’t far off at times, especially on Half Light II (No Celebration). Penultimate track Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) even has an almost disco feel reminiscent of The Gossip, albeit on Valium. Elsewhere the sound is quintessential Arcade Fire both lyrically and musically.

Arcade Fire are coming closer to renewing the promise they showed on their Grammy Award-winning debut album Funeral, which shot the Montréal band into the international arena. For some, Neon Bible was something of a disappointment. The album had its share of great tracks: the blistering opener, "Keep The Car Running", the gorgeous, melancholic ache of "My Body Is A Cage" and a respectable reworking of "No Cars Go" from their first EP. It was energetic but, at times, stodgy and moreover sounded dangerously close to a Springsteen tribute album, losing the sound that made them unique on their first two releases. It was an album made by a band that had just started playing in large venues and festivals in front of crowds of thousands and had lost the intimacy of playing in small French Canadian clubs.

The Suburbs does more than correct this. It will not only appeal to fans of Neon Bible but also appease those who missed the intimacy and confessional quality of the first releases. It recaptures that melancholic yet deliriously optimistic bent that Funeral expressed so well, with its soaring orchestration, heartache and nostalgia of unrealized dreams half-remembered. The Springsteen influence is not entirely lost however, and is present on tracks such as "Empty Room" - which retains that pulsating, racing heartbeat of New Jersey rock - and the title track with its lyrics “In the suburbs I, I learned to drive, And you told me we’d never survive, Grab your mother’s keys we’re leaving” reminiscent not only of The Boss but perhaps of Terence Malik’s Badlands.

Singer Win Butler again leads on the majority of the songs but there is more interplay between him and spouse Régine Chassagne. The effect is taut and raw, like pulling on both ends of a string at the same time: a tug-of-war in miniature. Interestingly, for The Suburbs, Arcade Fire mastered each track on the album onto a dubplate and then transferred it back to digital so that the CD and digital versions of the album sound like the vinyl.

This is Arcade Fire at their best, bringing together what was good about both of their previous albums. At sixteen songs long it may be a little unwieldy but this is a band who have rediscovered what makes them great and aren't letting go anytime soon.

Music Review: Caribou – Swim

Ontarian Dan Snaith has been releasing music for a full decade now, under the moniker Caribou (and formerly Manitoba). Swim, the follow-up album to the Polaris-winning Andorra, takes a bit of a welcome left turn. When you reach such a peak it’s either a sideways turn or a downhill ride, and this record doesn’t fail to disappoint. Snaith has traded a lot of the Beach Boys influence, lo-fi drums and Psych Rock for a more electronic disco sound, summoning the spirit of Arthur Russell at his best. Don’t misunderstand – this is still Caribou. It has the same textures, percussive layers and beautifully convoluted song structures you will recognize from the previous work, it’s just taken a holiday to Ibiza, Berlin and back. From the instantly infectious opener "Odessa" to the blissed-out dub of "Sun" to the stunning "Bowls", which comes across like a heavily caffeinated Pantha du Prince, this album is a perfect summer record. It’s not only his most club-friendly record; it just may well be his best. (Merge)

Music Review: The Knife – Tomorrow, In A Year

When faced with a new work by Swedish Electro-Pop artist The Knife you would expect it to be strange, even want it to be. But with "Tomorrow, In A Year", the brother/sister team of Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer bring the listener so far past the boundaries of “strangeness,” that all reference points become useless, like trail markers buried under snow. Known for their atmospheric and eccentric songs, with this album, the duo eschews the pop entirely for a ninety-minute electronic opera and a concept album based on Charles Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species".

As strange as it may sound, the weirdness is perhaps not wholly surprising from a band who on their debut album had a song with the lyrics "making lasagna... above the clouds" and given that Andersson recently attended a Swedish award ceremony draped in a red veil to reveal a rubber alien mask and accepted the award, for her Fever Ray album, with barely audible raspy grunts in place of words.

Commissioned by Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma to create music for the opera they had written about Darwin, it began life as a soundtrack to a live performance before it took root as an album. The record was made in collaboration with Berlin based bands Planningtorock and Mt. Sims and features mezzo-soprano (medium soprano) Kristina Wahlin Momme on operatic vocal duties. As Olof Dreijer says: “At first it was very difficult as we really didn’t know anything about opera. We’d never been to one. But after some studying, and just getting used to opera’s essence of pretentious and dramatic gestures, I found that there is a lot to learn and play with.” If it took Dreijer that long to appreciate it, it will take the audience maybe longer, especially when juxtaposed with the overloaded bass, glitchy distortion and nature samples.

Charles Darwin traveled to The Galápagos Islands, an archipelago of volcanic islands off the coast of what is now Ecuador, to research and write his famous work but The Knife chose the relatively nearby Amazon to record bird and insect sounds for this particular opus. The track "Colouring Of Pigeons" comes close to resembling a familiar sound but even in this, one of the more accessible tracks on the album, the opera and bass drone throw things sumptuously off-centre.

An ambitious, courageous album – opera fans won’t love it due to the distortion and most likely the average electronic music fan won’t love it due to the heavy presence of opera. It's obtuse, unwieldy, intense and astonishing. It is also one of the albums of the year and perhaps of the new decade but it will be one of those albums whose time hasn’t come quite yet. It will be talked about, half-forgotten, then dug up and lauded, probably once The Knife are in retirement; the familiar curse of visionary artists the world over.

With little of their trademark sweeteners - handclaps, pulsating dance beats or disco hi-hat – to balance the brooding darkness, this long-awaited follow-up to 2006’s Silent Shout, like Darwin's book, will be received with a certain measure of indignation and disbelief. The Knife is passionate about the evolution of its music: Let this album sink slowly into your skin and the rewards will be rich. Just don’t listen to it alone; “Tomorrow, In A Year” is as terrifying as it is unique.