Greensburg — The Arcade Fire

'The Suburbs' (Merge)

The call ended as the phone shut with a click. Eight minutes, but I knew it'd be more like a half hour. In the shadows of the urban sprawl, movie mulit-plex eclipsing the setting sun, I cranked The Arcade Fire's newest album, 'The Suburbs,' and sat on the trunk on my car, waiting, and the timelessness of growing up in modern times echoed among the asphalt and concrete.

'In the parking lot, we're still waiting/It's already past/So move your feet from hot pavement /And into the grass.'

The sun was gone, but streaks of pale orange and pink light clung to the darkening sky, two teenagers in the throes of first love inexplicably grappling for a few moments more as curfew lingered.  And, waiting for Dave, my friend from college, it seemed ancient, like old times, the summer days a decade and a half gone by, but the themes, and the album, are too classic to age. Only we grow old. Baby seats stare out the back window, and while we longed to escape the ennui of the suburban prisons, we now clamor back remembering the safety of our youth. Now, the cycle continues, and we look back with fondness in chords of ensemble rock and electronic-influenced beats, referencing all that came before it.

But there is no going home again, like Thomas Wolfe said, and records of dissonance and longing serve as our Dolorean, our way back in time.

'So I wait my turn, I'm a modern man/And the people behind me they can't understand/Makes me feel like/Something don't feel right.'

And I'm 16 and just got the license and the keys to the car and freedom came crashing in and the air never tasted so fresh. And there were nights filled with promise, but there was nothing to do. To a mixed decade cassette tape, the Cars and Big Star with '70s metal and '90s grunge, the soundtrack to our boredom, there were memories to fill the gaps of youth.

'Let's go downtown and talk to the modern kids/They will eat right out of your hand/Using great big words that they don't understand.'

And there was the strip, cruising down Lincoln Street or the main drag in Columbus. There are those girls that would give me those brief but intense feelings you never understand until it's too late. And there's Matt watching a girl in a parking lot, not the road, and crinkling his Datsun on the backside of a Chevy Suburban, then jumping on the hood to smash it down for the ride home. There's nights with a tape recorder and a poorly played guitar, creating a record with Tony and Brew under the auspicious darkness of Rebekah Park, creating our poor imitation of what Arcade Fire would later perfect.

'All those wasted hours we used to know/Spent the summer staring out of the window/The wind it takes you where it wants to go.'

And there we are screaming and laughing into the darkness headed anywhere, perpetually fighting 'The Suburban War' in the 'Half-Light.'

'Let's go for a drive and see the town tonight/There's nothing to do but I don't mind/When I'm with you/This town's so strange.'

And all the kids like us, before and after, looking for something to do in the crushing lack; of excitement, of stimulation; of experience of anything greater than ourselves. So we created it for our own. Haunting Vine Street and camping in the graveyard, sneaking down to the quarry among the tombstones shrouded in darkness and a juvenile uneasiness. Running the streets up to mostly good, with our petty crimes hidden beneath inside jokes, betrayed by spray paint on our finger tips, the street signs in our trunks.  Sitting in front of that house on Lisa Lane, skateboarding and pontificating on the future. And you asked if we'd always be friends, and I said it was not likely, the bonds of youth regrettably disintegrated by the chemicals of becoming an adult. And you thought it horrible.

None of us talk anymore, not one of the five. One in Portland, one in Atlanta, one in San Diego, another in Phoenix, one girl from the group 20-feet tall on a billboard. And they don't talk to each other either, causal scrawls on the Facebook wall, life and friendship reduced to artificial intimacy. And we all read between the lines now like we did back then.

'All my old friends/They donÕt know me now/All my old friends/Are staring through me now.'

And like the man coming through the speakers says, 'Now our lives are changing fast/Hope something pure can last.' And the purity is in the chords and memories they conjure. And we haunt the same corners of our brain like we haunted this town.

'First they built the road/Then they built the town/That's why we're still driving around and around.'

And among the 'mountains beyond mountains' of urban sprawl that grew up around us, we spent them like they were infinite. 'The Suburbs' is timeless. It is our youth, our future.

In the end, it's us.

Rating: 9.5/10