Arcade Fire's Suburbs is musically and lyrically the album of 2010: Its admonishing social commentary on impatience, conformity, and alienation is even more poignant than Radiohead's monumental album OK Computer (i.e. the reference to the chess player Kasparov being beaten by the computer Deep Blue is one of many examples of man's loss of self, both individually and culturally). One can understand why director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, Fisher King) filmed their show in NYC: Throughout it, the theme of the global sprawl surpassing personal nostalgia feels as apocalyptic as their grandiosely paranoid album Neon Bible. Yet the redemptive escape from "a garden left for ruin by a millionaire inside of a private prison" and "dead shopping malls like mountains beyond mountains" ultimately comes from the same place where No Cars Go, the same place that overcame death in their groundbreaking fantastical first album, the Funeral ("climb out the chimney and meet me in the middle"); it is the place where the wild things are, where love and hope commune together: the imagination.
And because the instrumentation, sound engineering, and song arrangements are seamlessly coherent, the album entertainingly achieves at relentlessly rocking your face right off your head.
Posted by Guest Contributor: Markos
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