In Rotation: Wavves and Arcade Fire

In Rotation
Melodic nostalgia and poor decision making
By Troy Farah
Published on 09/30/2010


Artist: Arcade Fire
Album: The Suburbs
Rating: 4.5/5

Continuing their obsession with neighborhoods and citizenship, Arcade Fire’s latest, The Suburbs, winds around familiar streets of escapism and nostalgia. Less gloom and more zest, it’s a departure from their more elegant Funeral and intensified Neon Bible, but retains that classic, quiet desperation that originally hooked fans.

The Suburbs is based on truth. Unlike suburban kids such as Joe Strummer and Bob Dylan who pretended to be train-hoppers their whole lives, Arcade Fire is recording their actual experiences.

There’s still that foreboding sense of apocalypse mixed in—that feeling of how fragile everything is around you, especially growing up in a neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses and cookie-cutter people. But there’s no judgment, just facts and feelings, orchestrated beautifully by frontman Win Butler’s melancholy voice.

The title-track opener is a ragtime piano based on a photograph of Butler’s neighborhood, a mixture of the past, present and future all at once. It tugs and pulls at memories that are similar, touching on an unnamed-yet-universal feeling associated with home.

Unlike most rock stars, Arcade Fire stresses the importance of community and family. A strong desire to settle down is echoed in “City With No Children,” which questions why certain districts, such as Williamsburg or Amsterdam, are filled with aging hipsters and no kids.

It’s not until “Empty Room” that The Suburbs picks up like more familiar Arcade Fire, but something still seems distant from the typical Arcade Fire tune.

“We Used To Wait” is certainly the one song that hits home the most. Literally. Besides being about patience entwined with love, Arcade Fire collaborated with Google to incorporate customized satellite images of fans’ childhood addresess into a music video. Butler even breaks the fourth wall, telling you to wait for the chorus, but it never comes.

Like the very subject the album illustrates, The Suburbs could use some compacting. A little less than half the songs could be better used as b-sides and crowd out the rest of the music. It’s one step below a rock opera, only because it’s easy to get lost in. And for a more lyrically based album, the music is shuffled into the background.

No band can mix sentimentality and community as well as Arcade Fire. Their third album may not be as direct or familiar as fans were expecting, but the beauty is in what it is, not what it’s not. Looking back at your childhood experiences don’t get much more poignant than with The Suburbs.

Artist: Wavves

Album: King of the Beach

Rating: 3/5

Wavves frontman Nathan Williams downed a cocktail of ecstasy and Valium right before performing at a huge Barcelona festival, started a fight with his bandmates, canceling the show and the rest of their European tour. Saying Wavves third album recovers from that incident is an understatement.

King of the Beach cleans up the lo-fi and features a new line-up, with Billy Hayes on drums and Stephen Pope on bass. The attitudes on King of the Beach can be summed up best by the chorus from “Post Acid”: “I’m just having fun.” There’s nothing to read into, but that’s the point. Some music is only good for lovemaking, for falling asleep or for cleaning toilets. The noise punk that oozes from this San Diego-based band is good for chugging Sparks. It gives you a good buzz and enough energy to get through any night, but it’s best used as background music.

Beneath the surface, Wavves is just power-chord pop-punk with more adult subject matter and enough lo-fi to sound credible. The result is more than tolerable, but as the song “Idiot” would imply, it doesn’t feel smart. It feels like a drunken idea, like climbing on random buildings and pissing off the edge. That is to say, it’s fun.

Each song attempts to outdo itself in terms of bad decisions. “Green Eyes” is a love song to Mary Jane, or having to choose between your friends and weed, something Williams seems all too familiar with. “Baseball Cards” drips with lethargy and high-pitched synths, while “Mickey Mouse” is an Animal Collective-take on wanting to do nothing all day.

Wavves are doing their own thing, at least what they want to do, and that’s good for them. King of the Beach is a step in the right direction, but really doesn’t break out of it’s own mold. All the kids these days are writing songs about weed and laziness and Wavves doesn’t add anything.

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Kind of old albums no one likely cares about this month. Oops.