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The Arcade Fire 'Funeral'

added 07 March 2005 at 16.33

The biggest buzz on the underground in the US last year, Canadian/expat Texan quintet The Arcade Fire have made an album that sounds like nothing else around yet is making a connection with a growing number of people.

Initially ‘Funeral’ may seem all over the place, but it has its own twisted musical template. French Canadian via Haiti and Texas, there’s some eastern European folk touches on ‘Neighbourhood #2 (Laika)’ while ‘Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)’ with it’s rumbling bass, plinking xylophone and manic violins is ‘Technique’-era New Order meets the psych funk of Talking Heads circa ‘Slippery People’. Elswhere, the choral vocals, circular banged out guitar riff, drunken strings and industrial pace of ‘Wake Up’ recall Toronto's Broken Social Scene, before the song’s coda offers up its Motown n’ gospel refrain of “With my lightnin' bolts a glowin' I can see where I am goin' to be / when the reaper he reaches and touches my hand.” It’s the way they give a cohesion to all this that has seen ‘Funeral’ mentioned in the same breath as Neutral Milk Hotel’s hallowed ‘In An Aeroplane Over The Sea’, the almost childlike nature of their magpie approach to taking the shiny bits of disparate musical styles and weaving something that sounds so fresh and so singular.
 
Much has been made of the fact that prior to and during the recording of the album the band suffered the loss of several family members, attending nine funerals (hence the title). But it would be a mistake to assume this is some kind of elegiac concept album. Although the sense of and reference to loss is present it doesn’t pervade the album to the exclusion of all other emotions. If anything the unifying theme throughout the album is not loss, but the opposite: life, family and love. The connection between husband and wife front couple Win Butler and Régine Chessagne is clearly a strong one, it’s highly unlikely that 2005 will produce a better love song than the uplifting ‘Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)’. It’s hairs on the back of the neck time as the rising insanity of Win’s vocals tell of salvation through someone else “You change all the lead sleepin’ in my head to gold / and as the day grows dim, I hear you sing a golden hymn / the song I've been trying to sing". 

Great music comes in many guises, but 'Funeral' is all the more impressive for having come seemingly out of nowhere. An album that reveals more of its charms with each and every listen, it's also an album that has that magic quality of appealing to both chin scratching critics and real music fans alike. Buy it now.

The Arcade Fire ‘Funeral’ (Rough Trade) Released February 28 2005.

Tagged as The Arcade Fire, archive

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