It’s likely to incite reams of journalistic hyperbole, but, fundamentally, The Arcade Fire have recorded a great f*cking album that will piss on most other releases this year. “Funeral” is the sort of perfectly-realised record you’d hope from a band at the top of their game. For a debut release it’s unmatched in recent years. Hearing it is to wake from a black and white slumber and to view the world in widescreen Technicolour.
Recorded in the aftermath of bereavement (“My family tree’s loosing all it’s leaves”) as well as the marriage of the band’s founders Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, these ten incredible songs tackle the ‘big’ issues. Life and death and its crushing inevitability is everywhere. As Butler sings on “Neighbourhood #4 (7 Kettles)”, “Time keeps creepin’ through the neighbourhood, killing old folks, waking babies, just like we knew it would”.
Amid themes of coldness, dark, loss and innocence (the recurring images are of broken pylons, broken parents, lightning bolts and snow) “Funeral” presents a lifetime of dreams and memories. Tracing their own twin existences, Butler recounts his move from Texas to Montreal while Chassagne remembers her family and how they escaped the Haitian dictatorship of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier.
Quite how these Canadians (the band is completed by Richard Parry, Will Butler, Tim Kingsbury and Howard Bilerman) managed to spin such tales of personal intensity into an affecting and coherent whole is what makes this record so special. Like Brian Wilson’s “Pet Sounds”, it would be easy to view “Funeral” as a sort of genuine song-cycle – a portrayal of the seasonal-like change from adolescence’s cocoon to the hopes and fears of adulthood. “If children don’t grow up, our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up,” croons Butler at one point.
Musically too, it’s ambitious. Calling on a cast of friends (including Godspeed You Black Emperor’s Sophie Trudeau and Thierry Amar) the band alternate between huge baroque showpieces (hair-raising opener “Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)”, the majestical “Crown Of Love”) and rattling pop songs (“Neighbourhood #2 (Laïka)" and "Rebellion (Lies)”).
There’s shades of the Flaming Lips, Talking Heads and New Order but amidst the scraping violins, chiming xylophones and pianos there’s also a burning flame of originality. An almost desperate urge to communicate. The underlying melancholy is never unbearable because another life-affirming moment is always around the corner. And strangely, like a funeral itself, this is a life-affirming album. A reminder that time is short and transient. That each second is precious.
When Chassagne sings the string-drenched closer “In The Backseat” it sounds like she’s found peace in this miracle. Her torment of death is relieved by an acceptance of who she is, where she’s come from and that where she’s going is unknown. “I’ve been learning to drive. My whole life, I’ve been learning. Oh Norah!” It’s arguably the most beautiful moment of the album.
We’re all of us just lucky to be alive to hear it.
