Arcade Fire: "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" (2010)

If Funeral and Neon Bible left you in any doubt that Arcade Fire were the descendents of Springsteen rather than U2, then The Suburbs clinches it - every song on this sprawling double album is about cars and girls in some way or another, which is all the more remarkable in that is the first time Arcade Fire have produced what might properly be called a concept album, an extension of the “Neighborhoods” song cycle to an an operatic statement of intent. That’s not exactly to say that Arcade Fire have simply embraced neo-heartland rock, though, since their perspectives incline more towards passengers than drivers, the weird world that unfolds from the backseat, people left in the car while it’s still running, wondering when and if the journey into the mythical heartland is ever going to get on its way again. In some ways, “Sprawl II” is the crowning moment in that aborted journey, leading on the the instrumental, almost classical reprise of the title track that closes out the album. Starting out as a bad-day-at-work song, it quickly expands and expands into a kind of prophetic vision of medium-town, big-box America, a jeremiad in texture if not quite in tone, if only because it’s so gloriously attuned to nu-80s production – or perhaps just noughties production – that it can’t help but feel slightly jubilant as well, can’t help but believe that such a sheer mass of people must mean some kind of community or fraternity. For that reason, it not only feels like music about the suburbs for people who never lived through the great suburban heyday that Arcade Fire elegise, but music for people who have never seen the suburbs full stop, music for a world in which suburbs and urban cores don’t really  exist in any discernible way any more. And, without suburbs and urban cores, driving, at least as heartland rock conceives it, doesn’t quite exist any more, since there’s no real destination, nothing left for the heartland to define itself against. One of the strangest things about The Suburbs,  then, is that it is music about driving, but not really music for drivers. At most, it’s music for people being driven, people who spend all day in the backseat without ever stepping into a car on their daily commute - stadium rock, like Springsteen’s, that still seems to be living in the shadows.