The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Arcade Fire · produced by Arcade Fire and Markus Dravs · Merge in North America · about 64 minutes
Mode
Chamber-coloured indie rock made plainer and mid-tempo, turning at the end to synthesised disco
Mythos
The fallen garden and the wasteland; the war that divides friends; the exile in his own birthplace; the flight to the mountains
Phase
Sixteen tracks; a title song and its broken reprise as the frame; two numbered pairs; the suburb or the sprawl named in five titles
Presentation
Album; sixteen tracks, about sixty-four minutes, issued at the beginning of August 2010
Register
Piano, guitars, strings and drums from a large band kept plain; a synthesised pulse at the close; two lead voices, Win Butler’s and Régine Chassagne’s
Scale
One generation and one landscape, remembered from adulthood
Governing Proposition
A band known for grandeur makes its third record longer and plainer, a return in sixteen songs to the suburb it grew up in, framed by a title song that comes back broken at the end and doubled in two numbered pairs: the place remembered as prison and paradise at once, the wish to give one’s children what one fled, and the slow time in which a childhood could happen taken by the speed of what replaced it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a piano bounce, light and almost jaunty, and over it a melody that aches. The title song remembers the suburb from a distance of years. Its singer is grown and has a wish (“I want a daughter”), and he wants for her the thing he once wanted to escape. The ache does not lift; it holds, and the song is already “moving past the feeling” as it names it. The whole record is in this first song, a place remembered as prison and paradise at once by someone who can no longer stay in either.
Merge Records released the album in North America at the beginning of August 2010, on the 3rd, a day after its release in Britain. It was produced by Arcade Fire and Markus Dravs. The band at the time was Win Butler, Régine Chassagne, Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kingsbury, William Butler, Jeremy Gara and Sarah Neufeld. Sixteen tracks run about sixty-four minutes. It was the band’s third album, after Funeral in 2004 and Neon Bible in 2007, and it is plainer than either.
The architecture has three devices. A frame: the title song opens the record and returns at its end as The Suburbs (Continued), a brief reprise. Two numbered pairs: Half Light I and Half Light II (No Celebration), seventh and eighth, and Sprawl I (Flatland) and Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), fourteenth and fifteenth. And a word: suburb or sprawl names five of the sixteen titles. Between the frame and the pairs the songs run mostly at one mid-tempo gait, a landscape of sameness heard as the record’s own ground.
Movement II
The ninth track is the record’s account of how friendship ends. The friends of the suburb were divided by taste, by music that “divides us into tribes”, and the song follows them out of childhood until, by its close, the cities they went to are as far away as stars. Then it rises into the loudest passage on the record, the drums driving, the friends gone. It is a war fought over taste, and the record takes it as seriously as its singer once did, which is the point: the small divisions of youth were the first losses.
What the record discloses can be stated and it holds. A generation raised in the suburbs remembers them as both prison and paradise, and finds as an adult that the place it fled is the place it wants to give its children. Under that lies a second finding, about time: the slow, waiting time in which a childhood could happen has been taken by the speed of what replaced it. The two meet in the title song’s wish and in the wars of Suburban War, and they are the record’s whole argument, made from many angles across sixteen songs.
Month of May, the next track, is the rage of youth in a fast punk thrash, a burst of force whose argument Suburban War has just made. Ready to Start sets the adult against the powers he distrusts, businessmen who would bleed him. The record’s ways out of the suburb are few and it knows them: rage, flight, and the long memory that brings everything back. Its range of mood is held in a wistful middle ground, and the songs that leave it, this one and the last of the pairs, are the record’s jolts.
Movement III
The thirteenth track builds by repetition over a pounding piano to a long climax. Its subject is the letter, and the wait for the answer, and the time that waiting held, now gone. It was released in 2010, and its complaint, that something had been lost from time when the wait was abolished, has since become a common one. The record was early to it. Heard sixteen years later the song has gained meaning as the years caught up with it, and it is the clearest case of the record saying something true that has gone on holding.
Around it the record’s middle runs quietly, and much of it restates. Rococo and Modern Man distrust the modern young in the same terms, and the distrust is stated more than understood. Wasted Hours and Deep Blue say softly what We Used to Wait says fully. The middle songs could stand in another order. The record’s length mirrors the sprawl it describes, and mirrors it by accumulation: more of the same streets, more of the same afternoons.
That is the record’s honesty and its limit. Nostalgia is a mood before it is a meaning, and a good deal of what the record gives is the mood: the ache of the title song, the half light, the long gait of the middle. Where it turns the mood into a finding, in We Used to Wait and Suburban War, it discloses something that holds. Where it does not, it remembers beautifully and says less. The condition is real and general, a generation’s rather than anyone’s in particular.
Movement IV
The fourteenth track builds the record’s myth most fully. A grown man returns to the streets where he was raised and walks them at night. The police stop him and ask where he lives, and he cannot say: the house he grew up in is no longer his to name. It is the oldest of returns, the exile who comes home and is a stranger there, set in the flatland of its subtitle. Around it the record evokes its other patterns: the suburb as a fallen garden and a wasteland, City with No Children naming a sterile place, the war of Suburban War. Here, for one song, the pattern is carried by a person.
Sprawl II answers it. Régine Chassagne sings over a synthesised disco pulse, “dead shopping malls” rising like “mountains beyond mountains”, and the flight from the suburb is made into dancing. It is the record’s one transport, and its turn. The inheritance was the band’s own anthemic chamber rock, and behind it Springsteen’s records of the American place, Neil Young and the long tradition of the concept album; this record stepped down from the grandeur of its predecessors into a plainer rock, and then, at its end, into disco, a turn that pointed the band’s next records.
The plainness was a wager. An acclaimed band made its third record longer and smaller and risked seeming smaller itself. The making serves the choice: Markus Dravs and the band keep a large group plain and legible, the strings thicken Empty Room and Suburban War, the piano drives We Used to Wait, and Chassagne’s voice carries the lift of Sprawl II. The faults run alongside. Win Butler’s voice is narrow and strains at the top, the middle runs in one sound for long stretches, several songs are slight in melody, and the mix is at times flat.
Movement V
The record ends where it began, and differently. The title song returns as a brief reprise, slowed and broken, and the remembered place comes back changed by everything the record has passed through. The frame is what the record knows about memory: that the place returns, and that it cannot be stayed in. The pairs know the same thing, Half Light seen twice and the sprawl walked and then fled. The rage of Month of May and the dance of Sprawl II, the record’s two ways out, are both brought back to the suburb in its last minute.
The record was widely heard and widely honoured, and its winning of the Grammy for the album of the year, on an independent label, was taken at the time as a sign of independent rock’s arrival in the mainstream. Sprawl II pointed the band toward the dance floor. Its title song and Sprawl II are still played and written about. But the anthemic manner others took from the band came chiefly from Funeral, and the record is heard less than that first album; much of its presence is as a record of its year, and sixteen years is a short span.
What it holds is one generation in one landscape. Memory, the family wished for, the suburb and the sprawl, the dead malls and the businessmen, the police in the night streets, the letter and the lost wait, the mountains beyond: each appears, most as a single image, and one place joins them. Labour and history are nearly absent, the sacred is absent, and the orders lie close together, one class in one landscape. Within it the record is whole. Its last sound is the place it began, returning too briefly to stay.
Act III · The Twelve
Sixteen tracks in about sixty-four minutes, and the spine of the record is required. The frame is: the title song opens the remembered suburb and its reprise closes it, the song returning broken. Suburban War is the account of how friends were divided, We Used to Wait the account of what has gone from time, and Sprawl I and Sprawl II the return to the old streets and the flight from them. Ready to Start sets the adult’s position. The length mirrors the subject’s sprawl. The test bites in places: Rococo and Modern Man restate the record’s distrust of the modern young in the same terms, Wasted Hours and Deep Blue say quietly what We Used to Wait says fully, and Month of May bursts with an argument Suburban War has already made.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a generation raised in the suburbs remembers them as prison and paradise at once, and finds as an adult that the thing it fled is the thing it wants to give its children, while the slow time in which a childhood could happen has been taken by the speed of what replaced it. The title song holds the wish (“I want a daughter”) and the ache (“moving past the feeling”). Suburban War shows friendship broken by taste, music that “divides us into tribes”; We Used to Wait sets the letter and the long wait now gone, an early statement of a loss since widely felt. Held from the top because the condition is general, much of it given as mood, and the distrust of the young is stated more than understood.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation comes at intervals and is mostly warm. The title song’s piano bounce carries a quiet ache that does not lift but holds. Suburban War rises at its close into the loudest passage of the record, the friends gone, the drums driving. We Used to Wait builds by repetition over a pounding piano to a long climax. Sprawl II is the summit: Régine Chassagne’s voice over a synthesised disco pulse, “dead shopping malls” rising like “mountains beyond mountains”, a flight from the suburb made into dancing, the record’s one transport. Half Light II has a slow swell. Between them a long middle of mid-tempo songs stays on the plain, Modern Man, Rococo, Wasted Hours and Deep Blue, and the reprise is a fall by design. Five or six of sixteen rise; the highest is high.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth is evoked often and built in two songs that bear the record’s weight. The suburb is a fallen garden and a wasteland, its children grown and its shopping malls dead; City with No Children names a sterile city. Suburban War summons the war that divides friends, and by its close the cities they lived in are as far as stars. Sprawl I builds the most: the grown child returns to the old streets at night, the police ask him where he lives, and the house where he was raised is no longer his to name, an exile in his own birthplace. Sprawl II answers with the flight to the mountains, and the frame returns the place to him changed. Held below the top because the pattern lives in single songs and images, and its figures are types of a generation.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own anthemic chamber rock on Funeral (2004) and Neon Bible (2007), and behind it Springsteen’s records of the American place, Neil Young, and the long tradition of the rock concept album. The turn: a step down in scale from the grandeur of the earlier records to a plainer, mid-tempo rock with a lighter hand; a sixteen-song record of one place; and, at its end, a turn to synthesised disco in Sprawl II that pointed the band’s next records. The stake was real: an acclaimed band made its third record longer and plainer and risked seeming smaller. What holds it near the bar: the concept album of place is an old form, the suburb had been sung for decades, and the plainer sound was also a move toward the larger audience.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. The frame is the knowledge of memory: the title song returns at the end as a reprise, slowed and broken, so the remembered place comes back changed, and the record ends where it began, unable to stay. The two numbered pairs know the same thing. Half Light I and II, and above all Sprawl I and II, a song of return in the flat streets answered by a song of flight to the mountains, are memory’s doubling, the place seen twice. The length mirrors the sprawl it describes. The sequence is counted here, once. Held from the top because between the frame and the pairs most songs are standard rock songs that could stand in another order, and the length mirrors its subject by accumulation more than by design.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over sixteen years. The record has been returned to, and the title song, We Used to Wait and Sprawl II are played and written about still. Its account of a time before the internet, of letters and long waiting, has been read since as an early statement of a complaint now common, so that the record has gained meaning as the years caught up with it. The recording yields on return too: the arrangements, the strings, the doubling of the pairs. What holds the figure: much of what the record gives is given on a first hearing, its words state their nostalgia openly and do not keep their questions open, and part of the return is to the band and to its award rather than to the record.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the rock and indie-rock album of its years. The intrinsic force is in the scale and the plainness: the record showed that an independent band could hold a long record of one place together in the plain language of mainstream rock and carry a generation’s complaint about time with it. Earlier bands had shown the form, and the anthemic manner others took up came chiefly from Funeral, six years before; that is not credited here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record was widely heard and widely honoured; its winning of the Grammy for the album of the year, on an independent label, was taken at the time as a sign of independent rock’s arrival in the mainstream; and Sprawl II pointed the band toward the dance floor.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is weighed over sixteen years and two months, on what can be shown. The form is whole: the album as released is still the record sold. Presence has been continuous but narrower than its reception at release forecast: the record is still sold and played, its title song and Sprawl II above all, but it is heard less than the band’s first album, and much of its presence is as a record of its year. The fabric is little fixed to 2010 in its instruments, a rock band with strings and piano, though its argument about the internet and its modern kids belong to their decade. What holds this lowest of the twelve is that narrower presence over a short span. Far below anything that has lasted a century.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The arrangements serve: the title song’s piano bounce under an aching melody; the driving piano of We Used to Wait; the strings that thicken Empty Room and Suburban War; the synthesised pulse of Sprawl II, where Chassagne’s voice carries the record’s one lift. Markus Dravs and the band keep a large group plain and legible, and the restraint is a choice that serves the subject, a landscape of sameness heard in one gait. The faults fall across a share of the record: Win Butler’s voice is narrow and strains at the top; the mid-tempo middle runs in one sound for long stretches; Modern Man, Rococo and Deep Blue are plain in arrangement and slight in melody; and the mix is at times flat.
Score: 8.4 / 10
One law governs the record: the suburb remembered from adulthood, prison and paradise at once, and time running out on the remembering. The two most distant elements obey it. Month of May, a fast punk thrash, and Sprawl II, a synthesised disco song, are the two ways out of the suburb the record knows, the rage of youth and the dance away from the dead malls, and the reprise brings both back to the place. Empty Room, Chassagne’s string-driven sprint, is the same isolation at speed. One band sounds the whole, and from the punk of one song to the disco of another nothing breaks the law. The limit is range: the mood is held in a wistful middle ground, narrowness is not coherence, and Rococo and Modern Man obey the law by restating it rather than extending it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form beyond what the definition asks. Consciousness is held, as memory. The family, as the daughter wished for in the title song and the houses where children were raised. Place is the record’s ground, the suburb and the sprawl, the city and the mountains. Commerce, in the businessmen who would bleed the singer of Ready to Start, and the dead shopping malls. The state, in the police of Sprawl I. Technology and time, in We Used to Wait. War, as the metaphor of Suburban War. The natural order, as the mountains beyond the sprawl. One place and one generation join them. What holds the figure: most orders appear as single images, labour and history are nearly absent, the sacred is absent, and the orders lie close together, one class in one landscape.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Inner Law at 8.8, then The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 8.6. One law, the suburb remembered as prison and paradise, governing a punk thrash and a disco song alike; a disclosure that the place fled is the place wanted for one’s children, and that the slow time of childhood has been taken by speed; and a form whose frame and numbered pairs are memory’s own return and doubling.
Limiting Dimension
The Imperishable at 8.0: sixteen years of presence narrower than the record’s reception forecast, heard less than the band’s first album and much of it as a record of its year. Below the rest, The Encompassed at 8.1, and The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: one generation in one landscape, its orders mostly single images, labour, history and the sacred nearly absent; a turn to plainness on an old form; and a reach whose largest event was an honour, while the band’s widest influence belongs to its first record.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Unconcealment at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, The Swerve at 8.2, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 and The Imperishable at 8.0 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.4, stands below it as well.
Basis · the album as released at the beginning of August 2010 (2 August in Britain, 3 August in North America, on Merge Records), sixteen tracks in sequence, about sixty-four minutes; produced by Arcade Fire and Markus Dravs; judged from knowledge of the recording, its words and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand. The album is the unit; any later material is evidence, not the object. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. Facts that could not be verified, among them the labels outside North America, the sleeves, the string arranger, the deluxe contents, the recording history, who sings lead on each track beyond those named, the track timings, and the band’s influence on others beyond its own later records, are not given.