The Arcade Fire
Funeral
You may have heard all the hype about Arcade Fire. You may have bought into it and picked up this album, or perhaps you resisted. In little more than a year Arcade Fire have risen from unheardofs to virtual indie darlings. I heard they're opening for U2 these days, and Pamela Anderson dropped their name while jiggling at the Juno Awards this year. Sheesh, I'd try to ignore the hype and pass on by too. The thing is, Funeral is an incredible album, plain and simple, and unlike most indie up and comers, this group deserves all the hype and praise they receive.
This 10 track indie masterpiece defies classification and cannot be described by mere adjectives. It is a sad album, it is a hopeful album, and it is a beautiful album. It is far easier to write about tangible, physical characteristics of the band and album, so I will do that here. As best I can tell, owing to the fact that the liner notes read like an off-off-broadway playbill, the core of the group is five people who joined together in Montreal at the beginning of this century. The album itself contains the contributions of more than 16 musicians however. You can read all their names right there in the playbill, as well as the album's lyrics, and a vague, obtuse autobiographical paragraph which explains the albums title.
This is an album that seems timeless. It seems not to belong to any genre, or any specific period of time. It cannot be lumped in with any other musical endeavor, old or new. This is an album's album. It is, plain and simple, 10 tracks of auditory bliss. You would be well served to pick this up. If you are too high it will bring you back to earth. If you are a bastard it will humble and educate you. If you are wallowing in apathy it will cause you to rise in action. And if you are suicidal, it just might save your life.
About the only thing bad I can say about The Arcade Fire is that their official website is a glamourized, artsy flash only affair, that while I will concede is beautiful in itself, is completely useless for finding any information of use, unless you are looking for pictures of band members riding a lawnmower.
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This page, and all pages on this site were created and are maintained by Darren Kirby using valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS, and are ©copyright 2002 - 2008. The Penguin image was created by Tukka, and is used by permission. Inspiration for the look of this site was provided by Eric A. Meyer's CSS gallery. This website runs on Gentoo Linux. It is served by Apache. PHP and MySQL hold together the backend.