I wanted to love this - the concept of this series is so interesting to me, and I've been following Arcade Fire since Funeral dropped in my late teens, but the writing just fell flat ... especially after reading another in the series (Bjork's Homogenic). The chapters felt too disjointed from one another, and the level of critique centred more around lyric interpretation than the band itself and the making of the album. For example - there's a whole chapter dedicated to other pop culture works (movies, TV shows, etc) that just seem to remind the author of the suburbs as a concept, and I found it a real stretch trying to see how these things even related to Arcade Fire.

I was expecting more information about the band itself, the process behind the making of the album, or even a more musical theory inspired critique of the songs themselves. There was so much potential, and so many good interviews from around this album's release that the author could have pulled into this book - alas!

I used to know a guy who, when asked where he was from, would answer 'suburbia', on the grounds that he had more in common with other suburban kids than anyone who'd grown up in the centre of the city his happened to be near. It was a fair point. Similarly, this book uses Arcade Fire's breakthrough album - and definitely not my favourite - as much as anything for a peg on which to hang an essay about the questioning of the idea of the suburbs in American art since the War. And it should be noted that this is a US definition which seems also to include small towns - Blue Velvet's Lumberton, for instance - in a way which felt alien to this British reader. The recurring idea is that paradox of feeling at least partly nostalgic for somewhere which, at the time, one couldn't wait to escape. And on that much, I certainly know what Edelstein means. Indeed, I think it's more common than he dreams; there's a well-meaning but slightly embarrassing aside on nostalgia as a function of privilege, which I don't buy at all. What about all those rappers who drop tracks expressing nostalgia for their early days in the hood? They may well lose their innocence younger than suburban kids, but the trajectory and principle are the same. Hell, The Wire's fourth season, often considered its finest, had that same arc as its spine. Sure, they're still in the US, but what about JG Ballard? He does get a passing mention here, but without reference to the way that he clearly felt at least glimmers of nostalgia for a Japanese prison camp, because that was where he was young. I don't think there's a spot on Earth so forlorn that someone who grew up there doesn't feel the odd moment of missing it.

Still, one can forgive such earnestness in the young, and Edelstein was only 16 when The Suburbs came out in 2010, which is now seven years ago, and isn't that terrifying? So one can also let him off the slightly clunky references to Sontag and Baudrillard, even when paired with the idea that the song title Rococo is pretentious, or the OS romance plot of Spike Jonze's Her sounds absurd rather than passé. His reading of Mad Men as Betty's story rather than Don's shows definite promise, and more than anything he's made me want to go back with fresh ears to an album I never rated all that highly - which is surely exactly the sort of impact a 33 1/3 should have.