#13. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

Because this album has been written about quite extensively, I’ll spare you my own internal deliberations on its merits and simply tell you what I think is preventing this album from being a truly great album:

“Empty Room”

“City With No Children”

“Half Light I”

“Month Of May”

“Wasted Hours”

“Sprawl (Flatland)”

Nixing those six songs would have resulted in a 10-song album that would have landed squarely in the #3 spot on this list, and likely would have wound up beating out Kanye West for the #1 spot on many lists.  Why the band insisted on stuffing in this obvious B-side material to bloat the runtime over an hour is beyond me.  There are five instant-classics on this record (“Ready To Start”, “Modern Man”, “Rococo”, “We Used To Wait”, and “Sprawl II”), but having to trudge through the unnecessary filler robs Arcade Fire of an opportunity to match the concise brilliance of their previous work.