COLUMN: Sometimes a ‘Funeral’ from an Arcade Fire is a good thing
What do you get when you mix a pair of brothers, some newly-weds, and an accordion player who looks like Napoleon Dynamite? No, it’s not a bad joke: it’s the Arcade Fire.
In a scene dominated by cookie cutter Emo bands, Arcade Fire’s debut album “Funeral” is strangely reminiscent of the Super Ball you had when you were 8. It drops from your hand with the dreamy opener “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” and proceeds to attack every inch of your room for the next 48 minutes. At times theatrical, at times indie rock, and at times a Canadian incarnation of the Talking Heads, this Montreal quintet know how to rock.
“Sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is,” sings Win Butler on the track “Rebellion (Lies).” Judging from the general feeling of sleepless paranoia that pervades the album, that lyric has become the band’s philosophy. This album exists in that empty space between the drive home after the worst party of your life and your grandmother’s death.
At times catchy and at times caustic, Arcade Fire explores the driving rhythms of the Talking Heads, plays with the urgency of a Joy Division, and can wail in a way that gives David Bowie’s vocal on “Heroes” a run for its money.
But the best thing about Arcade Fire is their ability to pay homage to their influences without becoming them.
Listening to “Funeral” doesn’t feel like a tour through the fringes of rock history. Instead it’s a cohesive, original work, bound together by imagist narratives that celebrate death and love and a thousand other things that we have all spent hundreds of journal pages on. From the disturbing “I carved your name across my eyelids” to the plaintive “My family tree’s losing all its leaves,” this album inspires a catharsis of the highest order.
Aristotle would have been proud.
Zach Pendleton is a junior in Enlish and is a critic for the Utah Statesman. Comments can be sent to zpendleton@cc.usu.edu