The Violence of the Place

We're still screamin' and runnin' through the yard


The Suburbs is a weird album. Running over an hour, it could easily be sliced into two short albums of equal merit with as many tonal shifts as the other. Each half would still contain The Suburbs, a song that sets up the album perhaps too well. But to stop at the Suburbs (though you never really leave them), you miss out on the truly strange pastiche that follows, an album that taken as a whole runs the gamut of piano tuned melancholia to Bizarro Abba; the cumulative result is disturbingly close to being a montage of the songs of my childhood. In it I can hear the 80s songs that still had heavy rotation on the radio in elementary school, orchestral strains (of course not alien to Arcade Fire) that speak of a radio tuned to AM and a fort made of dining room chairs, the clear and aggressive guitar of OK Computer, and awe-stricken panic-ridden drum breakdowns that approach Rhythm of the Heat. Lyrics of driving around, loneliness, and kids abound, becoming at an indefinable point repetitive, melding into a state of sympathetic ticky-tackiness.

The tone I can't quite describe, but it's something that seems to have only quite existed in my memories of old Peter Gabriel albums, laying somewhere nestled between straight rock, catharsis, and outright melodrama. I'm unsure of why it's so reminiscent of this and so evocative of my youth, though in my first summer away from home I'm in the mindset anyway.

Stand out track (other than the Suburbs): Rococo. This song I'm putting in contention with Coloring of Pigeons and the Amazing Sounds of Orgy for weirdest song. Quavering and driving at the same time, it whips itself into a frenzy over "modern kids" and my least favorite art historical period (trend?) ever.

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Listen to The Suburbs for now on NPR