NDPaul : J’avais fixé une règle arbitraire et stupide à Nicole pour ce top canadien. “Pas d’Arcade Fire, j’en ai déjà parlé. “

Finalement, je suis très heureux qu’elle ne m’ait pas écouté.

The original rules forbade me to do this, but I’m doing it anyway, I’m sorry Paul. God knows this tour de force is near or on top of everyone’s list, sometimes twice, but for good fucking reason. Initially, it was the epitome of what the blogosphere likes to call “a grower” (I too shuddered at “Month of May” at first, speculating that the end had finally come for everyone’s favourite indie-but-not-really supergroup). My reaction was tepid – The Suburbs was merely okay, even – dare I say it – forgettable. I think releasing those two “teaser” tracks was a mistake, not only because one of them was the worst ever, but it is the ensemble of this album that is required to fully understand and appreciate its magnitude, truth and gravitas. The latter came slowly, but when it hit me at the live show, (during Rococo, isn’t that weird?) I was converted. Something clicked and, I understood, finally, what all the great big fuss was about. (Wake Up brought me to tears, but that’s another story.)

I can almost hear you out there: enough gushing, get to the content. I hate to do this again, but truly, everything has been said. I promise that I have original thoughts sometimes (such as: I feel like/hope that one day my ne’er-to-exist children or perhaps grandchildren will ask what it was like “back then”, and all I will have to do is play this album and they will know and understand everything. After all, each and every word is Win’s advice to the kids, us kids, in all our naive wisdom). ANYWAY kudos plz to the world-famous Winestock Brothers (Grant and Brett, respectively) for setting down my exact thoughts on The Suburbs, the greatest album 2010 year has known:

Arcade Fire have always had something to say about civic planning. In retrospect, it seems like it was only a matter of time before all the neighbourhoods connected by tunnels on Funeral were realized as an even grander rendering of suburbia. Win Butler is no longer simply digging tunnels from window to window, but driving home to Houston on an underground highway. The idea of tunnels remain, and indeed that same sense of intimate subterranean life proliferates the album, but it all suddenly seems so much bigger. No longer do Butler’s visions apply to local neighbourhoods and the dirt dug tunnels running underneath neatly kept backyards but rather interstates dug under entire expanses of the continent, delivering us home from one North American suburb to another. It is the suburbs understood in a way that only a generation that didn’t invent them can: as a circuit board where the currents of energy run out of sight and the act of lighting up the generic grids of the surface world is achieved only as a result of the electricity that is carried in the wires (tunnels) beneath them.

It took me a long time to really like this album. I’d never loved Funeral or Neon Bible as much as other people seemed to and I was convinced in my own mind that this album would be no different. After being, essentially, force fed the album a few times by Sam, I became aware that the Arcade Fire were voicing something that only seems on a cursory listening like it has been said a million times before but in all actuality has very rarely been said at all: the suburbs are horrible, but ours- we may not have made them, but they did, to a large degree, make us. There is nothing “ironic” on this album and that fact alone is what makes it so ambitious and vital. Win Butler has said that the album is “neither a love letter to, or an indictment of, the suburbs” yet there is something very close to love here none-the-less. It may not be a love letter or a romance novel, but The Suburbs at its heart is about not despising something that we have been trained our entire ironic and facetious liberal youth lives to despise. We have been taught to despise it without considering our own personal relationship with it enough, or at least not well enough. And like any good love story, that process encompasses the sadness and hate that is sometimes inseparable from the largest and most important relationships we form during our growing up.

The idea makes me also think about the fact that only a Canadian group could have insight like this. In many ways, growing up in Canada is like growing up in the United States massive suburban expanse and I’m moved to remember fellow Canadian supergroup Rush in this moment who thirty years ago envisioned the suburbs as “Sprawling on the fringes of the city/In geometric order/An insulated border/In between the bright lights/And the far unlit unknown.” Win and William Butler also lived a great deal of their youth in Houston, and I think this has only helped develop their insight into the relationship of the city, to the suburbs, to the entire hulking United States to Canada itself. In the end The Suburbs is made up of the same stuff as Rush’s Subdivisions and the concluding line of that song: “a memory of lighted streets on quiet nights…”

In March of this year I was having a conversation with some total stranger and we were talking about all the things you talk about with someone you don’t know. When I told him I grew up in Richmond Hill he went off on some misguided rant about how much he hates it despite the fact that he had only ever driven through it. I was offended – yes, there is nothing to do there, everything looks the same, it’s an awful place – but that’s still somebody’s home, that’s still where someone grew up. It was the first time I realized my relationship to the suburbs was a lot more complex than the blind hatred I had awarded it. And then a few months later Arcade Fire released this amazing album that awarded that feeling all the rich complexity and variance it deserved. I realized that what I wanted to say to that stranger back in March was that all he sees are the kids and the buses longing to be free and the wasted hours before we knew where to go and what to do. But he doesn’t realize that those were the wasted hours we made new, and turned into a life that we can live.