So much has been said already about ‘The Suburbs’, which seems to be a very important album, some kind of monument like the ones which transcend a period of time.
The whole album is a search for something lost that cannot be recovered, haunted by visions of suburban wars, quasi-apocalyptic ends of an era, each song declining the theme its own way, exhausting the idea to the limit, bringing more delusion or lost hope every time, evoking each time more longing for a lost childhood and innocence.
Iman said yesterday it was their ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’, and it is, and if I wanted to give it the Baudelaire treatment, I would also say it is ‘Moesta et errabunda’ (Grieving and Wandering’). ‘But the green Paradise of childhood loves’ is peaceful and ‘The Suburbs’ is fueled with outbursts of emergency that do not exist in the two French authors: after all it’s rock music, and it can be fast paced and sonically loud.
These external visions of a passing time, reflected by the city landscape changes, are the mirror of internal changes, a passage from adolescence to adulthood and a loss of innocence that goes with it.
If each song lyrically participates to the building of the central theme, each song also brings something different to the sonic universe of the album, from the aggressively rushing guitars of ‘Ready to Start’, to the pixiesque early punk style of ‘Month Of May’, to the bombastic and epic sound of ‘Rococo’, an end-of-this-world-ready-to-give-you-the-chills song in the ‘Wake up’ style, to the Knife-inspired-Heart-of-Glass-injected ‘Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)’. There are so many music styles on the album, so much musical exploration, it is a surprise they work so well together.
All they were saying to us in ‘Funerals’ was to never get tame (‘Children, wake up
Hold your mistake up’), but ‘The Suburbs’ is the sad finding that people do get obedient and never live up to their childhood dream and hope: ‘They seem wild but they are so tame/They’re moving towards you with their colors all the same’, they sing in ‘Rococo’.
‘The Suburbs’, the slow paced and repetitive song that opens the album, is the disappointment to see yourself dragged on the same path, ‘Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m movin’ past the feeling again’, and the sad realization that this loss can never be regained, or may be could, through a daughter, before she becomes corrupted by the changing and degraded world: ‘I just can’t understand/How I want a daughter while I’m still young/I want to hold her hand/Show her some beauty/Before this damage is done/But if it’s too much to ask/If it’s too much to ask/Send me a son’
The album is about a desperate search for the innocent beauty that has been lost in the modern world, and a lamentation about having become something you were fighting against, admitting a fear to have compromised art just to be a ‘Modern man’, and realizing all his delusions: ‘In my dream I was almost there/And you pulled me aside and said you’re going nowhere’,
There is some brief hope in the middle of the album with the luminous and emotionally string-driven ‘Half Light I’ to have found a place to hide in the half light: ‘And in the half light/We’re free’, a hope that briefly continues with ‘Half Light II’: ‘Even in the half light/We can see that something’s gotta give’, but the song keeps bouncing with its ascending sound, from one delusion to another ‘Oh, this city’s changed so much/Since I was a little child/Pray to God I won’t live to see/The death of everything that’s wild’.
The lamentation about wasting the time and looking for what is lost, melts into a long search for a meaning of life, in the suburbs, in the dead shopping malls, under the overpass and in the parking lot, in an empty room. ‘These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose’ sings Régine in ‘Sprawl II’, since ‘Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains/And there’s no end in sight’.
The Suburbs is glorious and dense music for existentialist desperation and suburban boredom and may be some more deeper personal feeling, a refusal of what the band has become. ‘I need the darkness someone please cut the lights’: If they were going out to find some light in ‘Funerals’, here they are looking for the dark to better find their inner light.