Song Review- Arcade Fire "Sprawl II: Mountains Beyond Mountains"

Arcade Fire doesn't half ass much. The about-face disco-pop of 'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) delineates its style from the rest of The Suburbs but the track cogently flows and serves as a fantastic close to Arcade Fire's modern tragedy. Sprawl II features Régine Chassagne's strongest vocals to date in a character grown from The Funeral. It's an insanely catchy, sing-along anthem that recalls 'Heart of Glass' and 'Heartbeats' in the same instant with the song opening "They heard me singing and they told me to stop, Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock." The immediate break from its predecessor 'Sprawl I (Flatland)' accentuates the rather un-Arcade Fire orchestration that reads more Andrew Butler than Thom Yorke. The Indie rock powerhouse has crafted their most immediately topical and peer-influenced single in a stupidly successful four album discography.
The track itself is something like 2004 and and 2011 with a deeply unhappy emotion packaged in a translucent synth line that accentuates lyrics from the musings of a modern Sylvia Plath(?) with the voice of Madonna(?). The song builds as it repeats melancholic lines built around the Houston-inspired imagery of "Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains, And there's no end in sight, I need the darkness someone please cut the lights." The track itself is exactly what you'd expect from disco night with Arcade Fire; it's sad but pretty and emotive without succumbing to pop dramatics. It's a song for alot of emotional states. What most struck me as I listened the first time was how the song never quite got to being angry about its subject matter. Arcade Fire aren't mad or all that sad now. The whole album builds to Sprawl II in typical Arcade Fire fashion with the album's penultimate track being its strongest. The great vocal turns and beautifully detailed loops expand the horizon of The Suburbs and its pensive mental state. A sense of disco in the streets makes the tragic irresolution of Sprawl II all the more heartbreaking. The song never falls but its protagonist left outside, belting her heart out to a land with "no end in sight, I need the darkness someone please cut the lights." Shit, that's epic.