Not Moving Past This Feeling

(Blogger's note: This was written back in August, but delayed due to life and freelance deadlines. Take it as a preview for the 2010 keepers albums due next month, or file it under "Better later than never".)

Thanks to the Arcade Fire, I called the race for 2010's best album in August. I don't like every song on The Suburbs, but a new album hasn't hit me with this force since the Fleet Foxes debut.

Win Butler and company have penned the perfect missive for people who grew up in the suburbs but are not of the suburbs. At times, it feels like the wounded adult looking back on the whimsical moments from Funeral with a much darker perspective about the crumbling houses and shopping malls.

It's almost hard to move past the first track, easily one of the band's most powerful statements. Digestion of these new songs came with a blessing -- seeing a chunk of them live six days after the album's release. In a rare moment of performer honesty, Butler admitted they weren't too comfortable with playing the new songs live. They didn't show it when tackling Ready to Start, the harrowing title and Regine Chassagne's vocal display on Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). Butler knows how to create an atmosphere; on the Ryman stage, his group could have come from a century ago (minus their electric instruments). I counted nine, but at times there could have been more.

I kept coming back to Sprawl II, the record's penultimate moment, which is both danceable and full of lament for an inability to escape the suburbs. Live, Sprawl II loses none of its potency, its disco beat underlying a wryly positive message about continuing to sing when people just want you to punch the clock and escaping the artificial world created by the sprawl. But ultimately there's an acceptance that the world is small and those mountain cannot be escaped, so the only hope is for darkness to obscure them.

On the album, it serves as a counterweight to the title track and the ultra-maudlin Sprawl 1 (Flatland), which turns the suburbs into a bombed-out warzone rich with memories and sprawl. The atmosphere drives dark tunes like Rococo and the slightly pained Modern Man ("I'm a record that's skipping, I'm a modern man").

I have seen some reviewers talk about the album taking a positive view of the suburbs, but I'm pretty sure they were listening to a different record. There is a shiny thin veneer of nostalgia, but it only primes a darker foundation. We embellish the memories of our youth spent in faceless suburbs (well, I do).

It all returns to a little coda built on a simple backing track and the opener's gut-punch line, "Sometimes I can't believe it, I'm moving past the feeling." After all the emotion poured out in these songs, it's an effective reminder that feelings fade with time, and it's fine to let them go.