Arcade Fire - Funeral

Release Date: September 14, 2004

★★★★★ Tracks:
All of them

Writing is hard. When I saw Funeral was next in line on my quest to revisit my entire music library I cringed. I am simply not creative or descriptive enough to express how great this record is. Most of you already know. You already know how perfectly Funeral taps into all of life’s emotions. There is joy and empowerment and sadness and despair here, oftentimes all felt within one song. There has never been a better record to invoke the nostalgic memories of childhood, poetic lyrics that paint pictures of those memories into your head so completely you realize you had forgotten them before you heard Arcade Fire. These statements hold true for the album as a whole as well as with each individual song, which not only makes Funeral one of the best records ever made, but all ten tracks act independently as some of the best singles to come out of the past decade.

What first caught my ear with Funeral was the raw, fearful emotions of young love locked up in the lyrics of “Crown of Love” and especially “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” where Win Butler sings of digging a tunnel from his childhood window to a companion’s to escape his parents' sadness, and as the song progresses and the lyrics touch upon the loss of a loved one, Butler reflects on how we remember those we lose as we age. That this interpretation can be taken so ambiguously as to suggest the loss of love, family, innocence, or friendship (or all of the above) with perfectly complimentary instrumentation is nothing short of genius. Pondering life’s meaning and how we make our way in this world are tackled with simple potent statements in “Wake Up” (If the children don’t grow up / Our bodies get bigger / But our hearts get torn up) and “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” (And the power’s out in the heart of man / Take it from your heart / Put it in your hand / What’s the plan?). And of course as the album’s title suggests and as the artists themselves have stated, death is frequently discussed. In “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)” a story is told of losing a brother, and the details of the story allege an interpretation of Alexander Supertramp's life (of Into the Wild). The album’s full concept just might culminate with “In the Backseat” though, where Régine Chassagne softly sings, I like the peace / In the backseat / I don’t have to drive / I don’t have to sleep / I can watch the countryside / And I can fall asleep / My family tree’s / Losing all of its leaves. Some of the most powerful lyrics I have ever heard.

Arcade Fire’s legacy has grown over the years culminating with a surprise 2011 grammy for The Suburbs. You can’t help but root for these Montrealers (unless your Kings of Leon). From their powerful performance, which introduced them to a large crowd on Letterman, to one of the best live collaborations ever captured on camera between the group and David Bowie at a 2005 Fashion Week show, to their 2010 sold-out, live streamed MSG show, Arcade Fire have built themselves up as one of the generation's best and most respected bands. 

Related Arcade Fire posts: here

Spotify link to Funeral: here

Bat for Lashes

The hype machine was pretty fervid when Natasha Khan's Bats for Lashes dropped Two Suns early last year. But like most Next Big Things in the ipod era, it quickly quieted when the Next Big Thing came along the following week. I downloaded a bunch of Bats for Lashes tracks during her 15 minutes of Pitchfork fame, gave them a few listens and while I certainly dug it, I never really went back to it. It's not that it's not bad; there's some terrific stuff here. She reminds me of a cross between the chamber pop of Portishead and the likable weirdness of Cat Power. You could probably also throw Tori Amos and Kate Bush in that melting pot as well, or basically any other female artist that ever seemed as too eccentric for the mainstream.

There's an interesting cover of Kings of Leon's "Use Somebody" among these tracks and it led me to a thought. While the nicest thing I can say about Kings of Leon is that it's not really my thing, I admired the relative bravery in her covering a popular and contemporary song. It seems when a band covers a song, it's either a classic that they end up butchering, or a pissing contest to show off how obscure their cover choices are. So why don't bands cover more recent stuff? Dylan got covered all the time in his own time, and the Motown groups covered each other so often sometimes it's hard to know who recorded the song first. It seems blasphemous to cover Belle & Sebastian but couldn't a punk band go wild on "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying?" And why oh why hasn't a great rock-n-roll band tricked out "Hey Ya?" You would think it'd be ripe for interpretation. If this was 1969, every half-assed band in half the world would've recorded their own version by now.

And for the sake of duplicity, the Bat for Lashes songs in my ipod: