The last two Arcade Fire albums both featured in my Top 50 Albums of the Decade - Funeral at #4 and Neon Bible way back at #47, and I wonder now if I was too kind to the latter. Neon Bible raised the emotional stakes and it was hard not to know that while listening to it. Fortunately, The Suburbs reveals a more relaxed Arcade Fire - a relative term if there ever was one. They're still carrying the weight of the world, but it doesn't seem as though it's going to crush them at any minute.
The Suburbs is The Arcade Fire's longest album to date, but that extra space is used not to make a grander statement than ever before, but rather the give the band room to breathe. When you've got sixty-five minutes to play with, you don't have to pour your heart and soul into every second of it. It also gives them room for some interesting genre excursions. "Month of May", the band's most punk-oriented song, is more diversionary than anything else, but oddly, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)", a heavily disco-infused song featuring Regine Chassagne on vocals, is one of the album's standouts.
The Suburbs is unlikely to rise to classic status and I'm unlikely to object to that. It does indicate, however, that The Arcade Fire is determined not to live in the shadow of its one accepted classic.
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