I lost track of Wilco after 2002’s excellent Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. That album, with its eerily prescient 9/11 echoes (it was recorded before September 11, but released afterward), is compelling and emotional in ways I usually associate more with film than music.
Its follow-up, 2004’s A Ghost is Born, had all of the sonic experimentation but none of the soul. It sounded like the band trying to repeat itself.
When I first started the Random Weekend series over a year ago (on January 21, 2012, to be exact), I had one fear: What if I wound up with a bunch of Raffi songs?
I have nothing against Raffi, whose live album got a fair amount of attention from my daughters in their early childhood. He and fellow child entertainer Laurie Berkner are admirable talents. But I didn’t want the blog to turn into an episode of Sprout every weekend.
Track 10 on Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, ‘Month of May,’ feels like a cigarette break from all of the moody foreboding of the rest of the album. Maybe not a cigarette, maybe a shot.
This is a pulsating punk tune that feels a bit out of place on the album, musically, though lyrically it hits on many of the same themes.
Win Butler writes about the city being hit from above and describes a violent wind that “blew the wires away.” He could be describing an actual storm but this also sounds like more fallout from that metaphoric suburban war he’s been describing.
It seems Arcade Fire was thinking in terms of sides when they sequenced The Suburbs.
Recall that the opening (and title) track kicks off with the lines “In the suburbs I, I learned to drive, and you told me we’d never survive. Grab your mother’s keys we’re leavin’.”
Now midway through this song, titled ‘Suburban War,’ we have “In the suburbs I, I learned to drive, and you told me we would never survive. So grab your mother’s keys we leave tonight.” We’ve looped back around to the starting point.
‘Half Light II (No Celebration)’ keeps us in the 80s, musically speaking, with a synth-bass concoction that sounds a lot like New Order.
But lyrically, the song jumps ahead in time. The kid who ran around his suburban neighborhood at dusk in ‘Half Life I’ has since left home for the east coast. But now he is invited back and finds that the town where he spent his youth has changed.
Meet Me In Montauk 