Rolling Stone excerpts

When you call your first album Funeral, you set the bar high in terms of your maturity level. How can any young band evolve toward that full-grown third album after starting out with a meditation on death and grief? It’s no problem for Arcade Fire – these Montreal indie rockers are not shy about gunning for a solemn, grandiose, three-hankie anthem every time out. The best song on their last disc, “No Cars Go,” was a dead ringer for Neil Diamond’s flag-waving classic “America,” which gives a sense of the gargantuan scale of their anthemizing. On their fantastic third album, The Suburbs, they aim higher than ever, with Roman numerals and parentheses in the song titles. In their dictionary, “suburbs” is nowhere near “subtlety.” But that just adds to the emotional wallop.

The strange thing about Arcade Fire is how they instinctively scale their most intimate confessions to arena-rock levels, rolling out big drums and glossy keyboards. Unlike their mentors U2 and Bruce Springsteen, they don’t have much interest in everyday details; the closest they come is when Butler sings about driving to Houston “as we listened to the sound of the engine failing.” (Springsteen would tell you what went wrong with their carburetor. “You gotta put fuelie heads in that 396, pal!”) But that’s part of what has made these guys so hugely popular: You can hear how hard they’re trying, and that becomes part of the excitement.