Since Arcade Fire’s third album is awaited like the messiah’s second coming and people expect it to be some kind of present from the gods, we will necessary be disappointed, it cannot reach the overwhelming hype!
One of the song ‘We used to wait’ was played on the radio by BBC’s Zane Lowe, and another, ‘Ready to start’, leaked on the internet.
With Arcade Fire, we were used to a large and grandiose sound, some kind of out-of-this life experience through the ears and the brain, a totally glorious sonic experience. It does not seem that the new album is getting this direction this time. It might be because of the critics accusing them to be pompous and pretentious, or because they have reached the maximum capacity of what they could achieve in this area, but the sound of this song seems simpler, tamed down quite a bit.
Whereas a pounding single keyboard chord is repeated through the wholeof “We Used To Wait” (very much like for ‘All My Friends’ of LCD soundsystem), Win sings ‘I used to write/I used to write letters/I used to sign my name’
It is a linear melody, with almost no layers, quite monotonous and repetitive with some ups and downs. It’s only when the chorus comes with ‘Oooohh we used to wait’ that we are allowed to get some glimpses of hope all carried by the build-up of the melody. At this precise moment, the orchestration and the voices remind more their early work, like ‘Rebellion’ on Funerals, but it is less frenetic and more grounded. When the beat changes into a repetitive circle dance with synthesizers and horns, the song ends up with a more rebellious tone compared to the somewhat darker beginning. If the song ‘The suburbs’ previously released, was lacking this kind of soaring quality so present in their previous work, there is more of it in ‘We used to wait’, but still, they seem more resigned, much more contained.
The ‘used to’ theme carried through the song (‘I used to write’, ‘We used to wait’) certainly gives a nostalgic and melancholic tone to the song. The suburbs is a concept album, as there seem to be many allusion to a ‘war’ between suburbia and the city throughout the songs, so I am not sure if a song can be really taken out of the rest of the album. But the lyrics definitively evoke a longing for a time gone and a regret that ‘Now our lives are changing fast’. Going all nostalgic and sentimental, Win sings ‘I used to write a letter’, and that may be the reason why all the campaign for their new album was done with hand-written notes.
‘Ready to start’, the other song that leaked on the internet, starts with a violent bouncing beat and some bass line that could at time slightly remind a Sonic Youth song. This is a sort of departure for Arcade Fire, in the same vein than ‘Month of May’, but with an even monotonously darker tone and a repetition that goes nowhere, and certainly to no towering moment even though Win’s voice is louder at the end.
‘You live in the shadows of your song…’ sings Win at a point of ‘Ready to start’. May be he really means it, and these are really long shadows that Arcade Fire will have a hard time to get rid of if, whatever musical direction they are going to take.