Randy Newman’s Sail Away is one of my very favorite albums — it is alternately bittersweet and cynical, beautiful and brutal. I don’t know if it gets the attention and respect it deserves.
I see it was ranked #321 on Rolling Stones’ list of the 500 greatest albums — on the one hand, considering how many albums have been recorded over the past 50+ years, making the list at all is an honor; but on the other hand, are you really telling me there are 320 albums better than this one? Bullshit.
I don’t really have much to say about today’s Random Weekend selection except that a) this is one of the last tracks I would choose to highlight from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack if it were up to me; and b) John Travolta was such a sexy and dynamic presence back in the day and boy has he turned into a freakshow over the past several years.
And so we come to the end of my three-week exploration of Arcade Fire’s Grammy-winning The Suburbs. Dana, you can breathe easy once again (until you see what I serve up next… you might be begging for a little Arcade Fire a week from now!).
Like many concept albums, The Suburbs ends with a short coda that echoes the album’s beginning. That must be written in a concept album handbook somewhere.
The emotional peak of Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, and its finest moment overall, comes with this two-part suite.
‘Sprawl I’ and ‘Sprawl II’ are very different musically — the former is a minimalist dirge while the latter is an expansive New Wave epic — but the overall tone is consistently melancholy.
Melancholy… that explains why I really dig this.
The Suburbs is really finishing strong. ‘We Used to Wait’ is another excellent track. Propelled by a high jabbing piano chord, it’s an adrenaline rush that served as the album’s first single.
Thematically, Win Butler is back on the topic of technology and its deadening impact on modern life. He looks back nostalgically at the days when we would write actual letters rather than e-mails or texts.
