SONG OF THE DAY
“Modern Man” by Arcade Fire (The Suburbs, Merge Records/ Mercury Records, 2010). Written by Sarah Neufeld, Richard Reed Parry, Jeremy Gara, Win Butler, Will Butler, Regine Chassagne & Tim Kingsbury.
INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)
– The Suburbs is the third studio album by Canadian indie rock band Arcade Fire.
– It won Album of the Year at the 2011 Grammy Awards, Best International Album at the 2011 BRIT Awards and Album of the Year at the 2011 Juno Awards.
– Two weeks after winning Album of the Year, the album jumped from No. 52 to No. 12 on the Billboard 200, the album’s highest ranking since August 2010.
– On April 19, it was announced that Arcade Fire will release a deluxe edition of The Suburbs on June 27. The new version will include a “making of” documentary, Spike Jonze’s Scenes from The Suburbs film and two new tracks entitled “Speaking in Tongues” and “Culture War”.
– The album’s lyrical content is inspired by band members Win and William Butler’s upbringing in the suburbs of Houston. According to Win Butler, the album “is neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbs – it’s a letter from the suburbs.”
– The album was recorded in Win Butler and Régine Chassagne’s residence in Montreal, with some parts being recorded at the band’s studio in Quebec and in New York City.
– Win Butler describes the overall sound of The Suburbs as “a mix of Depeche Mode and Neil Young,” stating that he wanted the album to sound like “the bands that I heard when I was very young, and wondered what those crazy noises were.”
– There are eight alternative covers for the CD version of the album.
The album has received widely positive reviews from critics. Collating 43 reviews, the review aggregator website Metacritic gave the album an average score of 87%, which puts it into the category of “universal acclaim”.
– Writing for the BBC, Mike Diver wrote, “The Suburbs is [Arcade Fire’s] most thrillingly engrossing chapter yet; a complex, captivating work that, several cycles down the line, retains the magic and mystery of that first tentative encounter.” Referring to the critically acclaimed 1997 Radiohead album, Diver went on to say, “You could call it their OK Computer. But it’s arguably better than that.”
– The album was also on numerous best-albums-of-the-year lists:
#1 – BBC 6 Music’s Top 50 albums of the year
#1 – Clash Magazine’s Top 40 Albums of 2010
#1 – Exclaim!’s Top 20 Albums of 2010
#1 – Q Magazine’s Top 50 Albums of 2010
#1 – Triple J Listeners’ Top 10 Albums
#2 – Billboard’s Top 10 Albums of 2010
#2 – Magnet’s Top 20 Albums of 2010
#2 – NME’s Top 75 Albums of 2010
#2 – Relevant Magazine’s Top 10 Albums of 2010
#2 – Stereogum’s Top 50 Albums of 2010
#2 – Time’s Top 10 Albums of 2010
#2 – Under the Radar’s Top 50 Albums of 2010
#3 – Spin’s 40 Best Albums of 2010
#4 – MTV’s 20 Best Albums of 2010
#4 – Rolling Stone’s 30 Best Albums of 2010
#7 – Paste Magazine’s 50 Best Albums of 2010
#9 – American Songwriter’s Top 50 Albums of 2010
#11 – Drowned in Sound’s Albums of the Year
#11 – Pitchfork Media’s Top 50 Albums of 2010
Glide Magazine’s Top 20 Albums of 2010
NPR’s 50 Favorite Albums of 2010