On Arcade Fire’s third album, The Suburbs, singer Win Butler laments of growing older. The kids don’t dress the way they used to, he has trouble identifying his childhood home and his estranged friends no longer recognize him. On another album, such commonplace realizations would be cause for a moment of bittersweet pause, but this is an Arcade Fire album, so these aches of nostalgia hit Butler in violent, harrowing spasms. “Oh my old friends, they don’t know me know,” he cries to the heavens, as sober drums boom and choral strings weep as if the entire universe has been thrown into crisis. In spite of these undue histrionics, The Suburbs is actually Arcade Fire’s loosest, unhurried record yet, taking its trip down memory lane at a pace allowing detours for all the conflicting emotions it evokes. The gist of Butler’s angst: He’s no longer a part of a world that he's pretty sure he doesn’t want to belong to anyway, so why does he feel so bad? He knows he can’t answer that, and ends the album acknowledging the futility of dwelling on the past. “If I could have it back, all the time that we wasted,” he sings, “I’d only waste it again.”
Also in stores this week:
* Transit Transit, the second full-length from Los Angeles shoegazers Autolux
* The third solo album from U.G.K. rapper Bun B, Trill O.G., which features production from J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League and DJ Premier
* An acoustic career retrospective from The Black Crowes called Croweology
* And hard copies of Wavves’ King of the Beach, along with new discs from Gov’t Mule, Los Lobos, Buckcherry and Dr. John. %uFFFD
