After the annoying long tease, we can hear the new songs at last. It was all over the news and blogs yesterday, Arcade Fire has a new single out, two new songs, the fans are excited, Arcade Fire is excited, NPR was excited yesterday, well everybody is excited everywhere…
The first noticeable thing is how different the two songs sound: ‘Month of May’ is a fast intensely raw rock song, may be more like the Pixies than like the Strokes. They have had that kind of energetic and bold sound before, since it certainly has reminiscence of ‘Antichrist Television Blues’ from their previous album ‘Neon Bible’. Enjoyable as it is, the song is not that really innovative or original.
On NPR, they described the song as this special feeling they wanted to illustrate about May in Montreal after these insanely cold Canadian winters. They wanted to emulate this violent energy released when people are finally emerging after the cold months and this extremely moody weather with its wind storms, heat wave and other unexpected outbursts. The weather as a lack of control just as the ocean imagery in ‘Neon Bible’.
To many “The suburbs” will probably sound a little more interesting musically speaking, because of the emotion it releases. It is a slow pop song driven by the same cadenced piano melody during its entirety with no real bridge, no real built up like in some of their previous songs such as ‘Crown of love’ from ‘Funerals’, which also starts slowly. We stay at the same level all the time like a never-ending circular movement, and there is no rebellion there, it seems we are past this resistant feeling: ‘Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m moving past the feeling’. It seems repetitive but repetition has always worked for Arcade Fire and the strings at the end of the song make it even more gratifying.
So it turns out that their original Neighborhood was the Suburbs, the Houston suburbs to be more precise according to what they said on NPR. Win and Will explained they were born in a very small city in California, at the Nevada border, and then moved to the suburbs of Houston when they were quite young. When revisiting the neighborhood of their past, they remember the experience as a chock, as going to Mars, an unwelcoming place with all that hot air. If this theme has been explored many times by others, in this NPR interview, Win reclaimed the authenticity of his experience because he had been there, and is not faking it as a make-belief episode.
If life in the suburbs can be a bore: ‘We were already bored/We were already, already bored’, tit is also a scary place ‘And you told me I’d never survive’ and ‘The kids won’t be so hard/In my dreams we’re still screaming’, where hope to get out of there still exists’ So move your feet from hot pavement/And into the grass’.
Frustration and fear are themes really present in Arcade Fire’s work, but hope and redemption have always been completely intertwined with the previous ones. All these, plus the idea that there is an inexorable coldness which comes with maturity. ‘The suburbs’ seems to pursue these themes, between the remembrance of a scary past, the nostalgia of a lost feeling of revolt and the hope to pass it to the next generation:
‘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’.
Yesterday, on NPR ‘All songs considered’, Win and Will explained that both songs are some of the folk, rock, electronics poles of the album which lies between these two extremes.
All right, nothing will ever replace that special feeling, that rare emotion I got when I heard Funerals for the first time, their sound is special, and it is a lot of pressure to maintain it, to equal it on the next record. I don’t know if the new record has anything like ‘Wake up’, the anthem of a generation, since these two songs are certainly not as painfully redemptional as those on ‘Funeral’ or as devastatingly dark as those on ‘Neon Bible’, but anything that will bring me back close to this special first feeling is precious.
“The Suburbs,” is set for release on Merge records on August 3rd in the US.