Arcade Fire: The Suburbs

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Arcade Fire isn’t a band “known for thinking small,” said Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune. The Montreal septet’s newest album, The Suburbs, is about coming home to discover that it’s no longer the place you remember. Wry, reflective, and without resolution, the concept album looks back at childhood with a “mix of fondness and regret, wistfulness and disappointment.” All those emotions find complex expression in music that’s “among the richest, subtlest, and most unsettling of the band’s career.” Gone are the ominous, overblown arrangements of 2007’s Neon Bible and the “shout-from-the-rafters singalongs” of 2004’s Funeral. The album, “a generously paced collection of meditations,” in some ways recalls Bruce Springsteen’s The River, said Ian Cohen in Pitchforkmedia.com. Though the concerns expressed in The Suburbs are “at times mundane, that makes them no less real.”