Introduction/Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Greetings, and welcome to the first post of (hopefully) many in my new blog, The Paycheque Review.

The concept is simple: every paycheque, I will purchase a new album, listen to it intently, and then share my thoughts with you, the reader. These record purchases will often be newly released titles, but will also incorporate some older records that perhaps didn't get their time in the sun when they were first released. My objective is to spur the discussion of new music, and to do my part in helping music to become a prominent part of our lives once more, and not just pleasant background fodder for other, more important things.

Some notes about the writer: I'm a 25-year-old male who resides in Victoria, British Columbia. I am the lead singer of this band: http://www.yearoftheratmusic.com . My music of choice is rock and roll (in all its incarnations), but I also enjoy dance music, hip hop, classical, old school R&B (think Motown) and 80s/early 90s pop. I have no great love of jazz, most types of heavy metal, hardcore or modern pop, so you won't find any reviews of said genres in this blog.

As of recently, I buy all of the music that I listen to. For years I, like many others of my generation, downloaded a vast quantity of music illegally. I'm not passing judgment or giving any kind of value statement about the state of music ownership, but merely stating that it is my personal view that music is becoming increasingly valueless as a result of our practices and attitudes toward it. I believed for a long time that my actions had no discernable effect on the music industry or upon individual artists, until I became one myself and realized that the trickle-down effect has a large impact upon the way that people view music as a product. In trying to promote and sell my band's recently-released debut EP, I have encountered a great deal of antipathy from people with regards to purchasing music, even in support of grassroots bands such as ourselves.

Alright, soapbox rant over. I hope that this blog convinces you to buy the occasional album, and if you go to a live show (which you should wherever possible), please, for the love of Vishnu, buy the band's merchandise if they entertain you. It goes such a long way in supporting them not only financially, but emotionally as well.

One final note: While I will only actually do a review of a commercial album every two weeks, I'm happy to review any smaller band's release in the intervening time between commercial reviews. So, if you're a band that's looking to get a review (however insignificant as mine might be), please feel free to send me a link to your stuff (or mail me a copy of your album, I'll provide an address if you email me) and I will get to it when I am able.

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

I'm sure that many Canadians have as personal an association with Arcade Fire as I do. They're one of those rare bands that seem to reach out and touch people from all walks of life, especially in this country, where the band has become something of an establishment.

My first memory of the band comes from about 2004. I had recently moved into the detached suite in my parents' house, which was my first taste of personal freedom, and Funeral was the soundtrack to those first few blissful months of cleaning the place up and making it mine. I have one of those peculiarly vivid memories that we sometimes have of the jejune of blaring "Neighbourhood #2 (Laika)" and "Wake Up" while washing an entire eight-piece set of hideous Martha Stewart dishes. I think I probably ran through that disc about four times as I scrubbed the factory crud off of lavender-coloured crockery.

I'm notoriously rough on my personal belongings, and my copy of Funeral is a testament to this fact: like a well-loved softcover book, the cardboard sleeve is creased and dented, the flimsy paper insert torn in places and coffee-stained. Whoever lends me a book is usually in for a bit of a shock when they receive back a dog-eared, mangled corpse of their once-pristine document, but to me this has always been the evidence of love and attachment. It's for this reason that I always gravitate to cardboard CD sleeves over plastic jewel cases, they just feel so much more personal to me. Perhaps I just like to wreck things.

The cover of The Suburbs is beautifully nondescript, in much the same way that Funeral's was. It looks like something the band members themselves could have come up with, and perhaps did. Printed on glossy cardboard, it resembles an old family photograph, the kind you might forget about in some dusty volume of family memories, hiding in an attic to be discovered at some unknown future juncture. The insert is similarly homey: lyrics are scrawled in what is presumed to be Win Butler's handwriting across several pages of dull images. It's perfectly comforting and simultaneously depressing, in much the same way that the suburbs themselves are.

I listen to a lot of my music in the car. I have a stock sound system in my old Hyundai, but I still love the way that the music surrounds me in such an enclosed environment. My first listen to The Suburbs was on my way to work, a twenty minute drive from my house. In this space of time I was roughly able to acquaint myself with the album's first four tracks: "The Suburbs," "Ready to Start," "Modern Man" and "Rococo." I can safely say that few times in my entire history of music listening have four songs drawn me into album in such a way that these four tracks did. "The Suburbs" is a gloriously haunting, lilting reflection on growing up in the 'burbs, and remains perhaps my favourite song on the album. I was already familiar with "Ready to Start" from its radio play as the first single off the record, but it was only after listening to it in full stereo glory that I realized how much I love this song: in it the band realize their full pop potential, deploying a clever, jaunty bassline to carry you through a dazzling array of synth hooks and reserved-yet-emotionally-cloying vocals. "Modern Man" switches things up with a rarely-used but always effective 7/4 beat, and is one of those songs that embeds itself a little further in your heart with every listen.

With 16 tracks, the album certainly had room to be organized in many different ways. The range of songs, both thematically and stylistically, probably made for some tough calls in terms of song order, but to their credit the band seemingly shied away from attempting any kind of deliberate "movements" throughout the record. Instead, they allow each song to speak for itself, while simultaneously contributing to the whole. The middle five songs of the album are probably the most contiguous, which is something of a given considering the duality of "Half Light I" & "Half Light II." This was the section that required the most chewing for me to really digest, but after many listens I can number "City with No Children" and "Suburban War" among the tracks I commonly skip to. "Month of May" is obvious single-fodder, which for me is often something to be slightly wary of, and sure enough it's probably the one track on the album where it feels like the band is grasping at something slightly beyond their reach. Still, it's always good to know that a band so comfortable with throwing a French horn on a recording is still able to acknowledge that little bit of The Clash lurking inside of them.

As the album moves into the home stretch, it has a lot of love left to give: "Wasted Hours" is the kind of power folk that I haven't heard since Neil Young was, well, young, and "We Used To Wait" showcases some of the most wonderfully simple poignancy I've ever heard in lyric writing. It really resonated with me in terms of my own feelings on how our attitudes and values are changing in the technological age.

Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) continues the band's experimentation with synthesis and sequencing, and also lends a much-needed break from Butler's effective yet somewhat thin attack by utilising Regine Chassagne's ever-unique, Bjork-esque ghost-croon. It's a dancey departure from the rest of the album's tone, and an interesting way to close things out.

Recommendation: Buy it. This is an instant classic, and a true return to form after the band's nigh-misstep Neon Bible. It's one of those albums that will be at the top of your shelf for years, if not forever. As for my copy, well, it's destined to be creased, dented and generally look like it's been dragged through hell and back, which seems to be the highest compliment I can pay something.