ARCADE FIRE

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Arcade Fire deliver a deluxe edition of their Grammy-winning album The Suburbs

By Burg Staff on Aug. 18, 2011
BY MATT ASHARE

Arcade Fire, The Suburbs — Deluxe Edition (Scenes From the Suburbs), (Merge)

SUBURBIANA: Arcade Fire reissue their Grammy winner

It’s only been a year since Arcade Fire, then just an emerging indie-label band from Toronto, released the ambitious little album that could — a 16-track opus called The Suburbs. Thanks in part to some masterful marketing, which included two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden the week of the disc’s release, a campaign that encouraged fans to pre-order downloads of the disc at Amazon for a steep discount, and eight alternative cover-art schemes (collect them all or have fun trading with your friends), The Suburbs debuted at number one on the Billboard album charts and went on to earn gold certification by the end of 2010. Even more surprising, in February the disc famously became the first indie-label release to win the highly coveted Grammy for “Album of the Year,” much to the chagrin of Beiberheads around the globe.

         But Arcade Fire and their Durham, NC-based label Merge haven’t given up on The Suburbs just yet. Almost a year to the day of disc’s original release, there’s now a brand new, expanded, “deluxe” edition of the album, featuring, as the sticker on the cover boasts, a bonus DVD containing a 30-minute short by acclaimed film/video producer Spike Jonze titled “Scenes From the Suburbs,” the video for the disc’s title track, and a “behind the scenes” documentary about the making of the video, as well as a two new songs (“Culture War” and “Speaking in Tongues”) and an 80-page photo booklet.

Apparently, there wasn’t room on the sticker to mention the slip of paper inside the fancy case that contains directions on how to download two more tracks from the Merge website — a nearly 8 minute-long Damian Taylor remix of the defiant guitar rocker “Ready To Start” that puts a bit more emphasis on ambient electronics and, toward the end, morphs into something resembling a four-on-the-floor dance number, and a solo piano demo of the ruminative “Sprawl I.” Oh, and the slow swinging “Wasted Hours” now has a climactic coda that adds 1:04 to the original and begs the question, “what was singer/songwriter/guitarist Win Butler thinking when he shortened the song to begin with?”

         All of which is well and good. Jonze’s film puts a compelling if somewhat fragmented narrative to a dystopian storyline the disc only hints at; “Speaking in Tongues,” which features a vocal cameo by David Byrne, is as good as anything on the original disc; and there’s nothing wrong with an extra three-and-a-half minutes of “Ready To Start.” But what are all those hundreds of thousands of fans who already shelled out their hard-earned cash for The Suburbs meant to do? Are four-and-a-half “new” tracks, a DVD, and some fancy packaging really enough to justify buying the same album for the second time in a year?

         Now, I don’t mean to be critical of Arcade Fire or of Merge: they’ve both done a remarkable job promoting a remarkably good album over the past year. And there’s certainly nothing new about repackaging and reissuing “deluxe” versions of classic recordings. (In fact, you could make a good argument that mining the vaults has played a big role in keeping major labels afloat for the past dozen or so years — the monetary investment is relatively minimal, and any business that can get consumers to buy the same item two or three times over is clearly doing something right.) I’ve got my original vinyl copy of the Stones’ Exile On Main St., a limited edition CD version that came out in the mid-’90s, and the double-disc, 25^th anniversary edition that was released just a few years ago. Same goes for Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, which I’ve got on vinyl, CD, and, as of 2007, a deluxe 2-CD format. I’m keeping ’em all.

         Of course, much has changed since I plunked down cash for vinyl back in the day. Most recently, Billboard wisely began including iTunes downloads as sales in its “Top 200” chart. But, for all the convenience that streaming, file-sharing, and downloading may offer, for a hardcore music fan like myself, there’s just something qualitatively different and more satisfying about owning the thing itself, particularly if it’s got a fancy case, extra tracks, and an 80-page booklet. It gets at a concept that the music industry has been surprisingly slow to pick up on — namely that when people purchase an album, they’re not buying the music so much as they’re buying into an identity and acquiring a fetish object with a weight that’s both physical and conceptual. Owning a copy of The Suburbs, in regular or reissued form, isn’t the same as having the tracks on your iPod, much less streaming or even sharing them on SoundCloud. Sure, you can show your friends your iTunes list, assuming they have the patience. But until Apple comes up with a revolutionary new app, you can’t put any of that on a shelf in your living room.