It is a phenomenon that still startles me. On weekend evenings from May through October, as dusk settles down upon my suburban home, small fires appear all around me. The suburban men I call my neighbors spend their weekend days doing what suburban men in the Midwest have done for decades: playing golf, mowing lawns, wielding power tools.

But at night they build bonfires in their fire pits, and my neighborhood is transformed into Tract Home National Park, a primitive campground where the big-screen, hi-def TV is only a few steps away.

It is unclear how many of them will remain my neighbors a year from now. The For Sale signs in my neighborhood are suddenly more prevalent than the Chemlawn signs that used to dominate the idyllic cul-de-sacs. Rumors of foreclosures abound.

Still, the lawns look fabulous. In fact, this summer may represent the high renaissance of manicured suburban lawn care. This is because suburban men have more time for yard work when they are lacking more remunerative kinds of employment, and it is now de rigueur to mow the lawn a second time at a 90-degree angle from the first mowing, creating a marvelous checkerboard pattern that may simply be a vestigial memory of the old life, a wistful reminder of the spreadsheets we all used to create and manage.

Unemployment is awful, even in suburbia. But we look good and maintain an upstanding image as we slowly twist in the wind. The fires in the fire pits remind me of army campgrounds on the night before a big battle.

Into this idyllic, terrifying life comes the new Arcade Fire album called, appropriately enough, The Suburbs. It is a wonderful hour of music, prescient and disturbing and lovely. Like previous Arcade Fire albums, it is big and bombastic, full of portentous themes. And like previous Arcade Fire albums, it has a beating heart and a razor-sharp prophetic edge that slices through the political cant and reassuring rhetoric and speaks some hard truths:

Businessmen drink my blood
Like the kids in art school said they would
And I guess I’ll just begin again

Yep, retraining is the solution. At 55. With four college degrees. Yeah, that’s it.

The sentiments are delivered by Win Butler, who writes and sings most of the songs. Win grew up in suburban Houston, but decamped for urban Montreal about a decade ago. Like a lot of smart, urban kids who have abandoned the places where they grew up, Win indulges in some familiar suburbia bashing. He castigates the consumerist culture dominated by the twin temples of the shopping mall and the glass office complex, the sprawling, interchangeable neighborhoods, the rigid if unspoken caste system that divides nearly identical suburban kids into tribes, the endless, soul-numbing days of ennui and credit cards without limits.

This is territory that is well known to fans of John Cheever or John Updike, but, to his credit, Butler manages to map the same conflicted terrain in about an hour of music rather than in 500 pages of prose. The stereotypes, of course, are sometimes true for broad swaths of humanity and almost always utterly untrue for individuals. But just when I’m starting to grow weary of the relentless finger pointing, Butler delivers a disarming aside that confesses his own culpability:

Never trust a millionaire
Quoting the Sermon on the Mount
I used to think I was not like them
But I’m beginning to have my doubts about it

Welcome to adulthood, kid, where you can give away your cloak and keep your walk-in closet full of designer suits. These are the statements that convince me that The Suburbs is something very special, that the easy answers are not satisfying enough, not even to a natural finger pointer like Win Butler.

It’s all delivered with the usual Arcade Fire passion and urgency, and the songs are unfailingly incantatory and anthemic, aiming straight for the back row of the arena every time. In an era in which irony has been defined as the supreme hipster virtue, Arcade Fire remains resolutely unhip, preferring good, old-fashioned, heart-on-sleeve emoting. Not since the early U2 albums has a rock band presented itself so zealously. If they are not out to save the world, they are at least out to save that part of their audience that grew up in those interchangeable houses.

But if the hope cannot be suppressed, neither can the underlying sorrow be denied. Surveying a splintering world on “Half Light I,” Butler groans:

You and I we head back East,
To find a town where we can live.
Even in the half light,
We can see that something’s gotta give.

When we watched the markets crash,
The promises we made were torn
Then my parents sent for me,
From out West where I was born.

Adult kids move back home with their parents. And the parents lose their homes. It’s happening all over. That’s because an old way of life is dying. What has been will be no more. The bankers and the stock brokers have played poker with our futures. And we have lost:

One day they’ll see it’s long gone.

It was never supposed to be like this. It’s not the dream we were sold. It was supposed to be all about comfort and predictability, twin notions that must make God chortle fairly heartily. I only know one thing. Come to my neighborhood. I’ll show you the American Dream up close, torn and tattered; in shreds, like a battle flag. But nobody’s fighting. They’re camping out, like the night before battle.