Suburban hymns

Arcade Fire’s third album The Suburbs is in a long, glorious tradition of pop lyricism inspired by everyday life, writes Christopher Howse

Arcade Fire’s first album Funeral was not about a funeral. But, goodness, when we saw Régine Chassagne hammering away at her keyboard in red elbow-gloves with her husband Win Butler singing one of its tracks, ‘Power Out’, on Jools Holland’s show in 2005, we sat up and knew something had changed.

Funeral was, in part, about the suburbs. Arcade Fire’s third album, The Suburbs, out this week, continues the interpretation of city life from the viewpoint of the ‘kids’, with particular reference to parents, and disaster. Not that the kids get off without criticism. Funeral warned them that if they don’t grow up, ‘our bodies get bigger, but our hearts get torn up. We’re just a million little gods.’ In The Suburbs, ‘they seem wild, but they are so tame’ and  they’re ‘using great big words they don’t understand’.

The Suburbs has not lost the lyrical accomplishment that characterised Funeral. There was something of the Metaphysicals about Funeral, with couplets like: ‘You turn all the lead sleeping in my head to gold./ As the day grows dim I hear you sing a golden hymn.’ In The Suburbs there is a touch of Blake: ‘Oh, this city’s changed so much/ Since I was a little child;/ Pray to God I won’t live to see/ The death of everything that’s wild.’

Heaven save us from Ricksian pretension. This is not Keats. And for every listener who hates gangsta stupidity and booty-shaking, there is no doubt a practitioner of the higher snobbism who despises indie college kids singing of ashes and the grim reaper. But at least the eschatological yearnings of Arcade Fire begin in daily life even as they reach out for something transcendental.