Certain things are true about Arcade Fire. Boring, objectively true things: the band has seven fulltime members (and one married couple), is based in Montreal, and signed with Merge Records after a ferocious indie bidding war occasioned by their scorching live show and Funeral, their insane, brilliant debut album. Bandmembers have names and families – it was a sad spate of familial deaths that led the group to give their first record such a, uh, final-sounding name – and except for the fact that they’re living in Canada, and are probably nicer than you or me, the people in Arcade Fire seem normal enough. But I say fuck all that.
Because, when listening to Funeral – which, to be up front about things, I think you and everyone else should do – it’s best not to think of the band hunched over some Quebecois 16-track or playing the undercard at some Montreal rock club in Fall 2003. I think it’s better, and easier, to see Arcade Fire as what they sound like: an elemental, half-crazy tidal wave of a band, making music that doesn’t really sound like anything else you’ve heard before. Funeral is a tremendous record, in terms of its musical accomplishment and diversity (from song to song, from moment to moment) and in terms of its complicated but tremendous emotional power. It is, in short, the sort of record that makes criticism especially silly. That’s no small feat, considering the silliness of this enterprise on its best day, but when you have to review a great record that 1) doesn’t sound like anything else and 2) is bold enough that it practically demands the type of shitty Les Bangs-ian music-crit overwriting I hate… anyway, what I’m saying is that I blew several deadlines on this review. I just kept listening to the record, every day for about a month. I’m not tired of it. I love it. I’m just not sure how to write about it.
So let’s see if I can do this. Several songs have handclaps. Most have violins. All the songs are big, and several of them are overwhelming. Several are partially in French, but only one is wholly about Haiti. This isn’t working, is it?
There’s a suggestion, in the way this album is structured, of an overarching idea. Four of ten songs are a part of a loosely connected “Neighborhood” cycle. And there’s a political pulse here, both in the heartfelt (at least the English parts) heartache in the failed-state elegy of “Haiti” and the stunning, string-laced “Neighborhood #4,” which manages to be despairing and soaringly, daringly optimistic at once. This is not a concept record, though. One song sounds nothing like the next. The album-closing “In The Backseat” is the best Bjork song in years. The stomping, roaring “Wake Up” is like church music from the most humane, rocking house of worship ever not to exist. The inappropriate/perfect disco-bass freakout in the stirring “Rebellion (Lies)” sends an already anthemic joint over the top into a space few songs ever touch. Best of all, maybe, is the strongest, strangest album-opening track I’ve ever heard: “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” takes two common childhood fantasies – the first being a snowstorm that blanks the neighborhood and cancels school forever; the second is the darker prospect of being among the last people on earth – and hitches them to a passionate score that climbs from tentatively chugging to full-on orchestral/choral grandeur. It’s great. They’re all great.
Critics, like everyone else, are lazy at heart. A blindside of an album like Funeral shames our instincts – the hipster glibness and shorthand comparision-dropping that define so much music criticism – and frustrates them. Still, though, I’m going to push on with one final comparison. It’s not musical. My favorite book is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. There’s a good reason why Moby Dick is considered a difficult read (and it shouldn’t be confused with the bad reason, which is its length): the novel moves in fits and starts, with Melville taking breaks from his gripping central story for notably less-gripping digressions about cetology, nautical knots, and the rendering of blubber. All these are well-written, of course, but also jarring and frankly disruptive to the reader. To me, there’s one overwhelming reason why those digressions are in there: Melville, who set out in Moby Dick to write a commercial adventure book and pay off some debts, realized that he had hooked into something bigger than he could understand. He throws obstacles in his own path, he tries to tamp down his own virtuosity. But the book is loose from him, it’s off on its own. There’s something unhinged about the way the story unfolds, about the crazy structure and leaps between characters and voices and incidents. We’re all unconsciously postmodernists by this point, and this eruption of the creative struggle into the text is something we’ve seen before. But the thrill of Moby Dick, to me, isn’t just its literary brilliance or structural novelty. It’s the thrill of being pulled along on Melville’s ride with him, and in the crazy passion of great art being created with an almost unreasoned skill. Brilliance is happening faster than anyone – you, the author, whatever poor editor must have lost sleep over that text – can handle. Funeral is like that. It’s that good, that exhilarating, and that new. If a better record comes out this year, I’d sure love to hear it. |