An Ace In The Sleeve - The Trajectory of the Arcade Fire
By kid spill

In the surprisingly good remake of Starsky and Hutch, Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear says, “I know some people who know some people who steal from people.”  Well, I too know some people who know some people who steal from people, but in my instance the stealing relates not to high-speed-chase-ready gleaming hot rods or mountainous piles of snow-like cocaine (one can only dream), but unreleased art-rock albums.  And so it appears that the full swell of my lameness has been realized.  Ahem.  At any rate, it was with great frisson that the newest album from valiant Montreal-based rock band The Arcade Fire fell prematurely into the sweaty, greedy hands of the converted masses.  The hype was huger than huge (at last count, a gushing thread devoted to the new album had grown to six pages on the indie music online town square, “20hz”), and when Funeral was finally released on Merge Records, a new band was collectively crowned King.

I first became aware of the rumblings of something interesting in the middle of the tedious cold that characterized February 2004 when my friend May and I went shopping for long underwear at a massive downtown bargain basement.  As we emerged back onto the street, May spotted a dirty flier emblazoned with “Arcade Fire” and some show details pasted on the side of a garbage bin.  Her eyes glossed over as she breathed, “Oh, I’ve heard they’re very good.”  Her enraptured response decided for me that we were going.

Later that week, we once again braved the ridiculous cold to check out the show.  Sitting at the back of the room (sidelined by a back injury begat by a cab driver’s laissez-faire attitude towards street medians), I watched the standard crowd of young and aloof Sneaky Dee’s denizens become transfixed by the actual cavalcade of fervent, life or death rock music, tempered by playful stage antics and the smoky voice of sometimes singer Regine Chassagne.  The floor literally shook, its wooden boards moving in waves, threatening the oblivious patrons in the restaurant below.

This show, which ignited the capacity crowd, was followed by a secret performance in a one-off venue which involved the audience’s participation in the employment of a cacophony of flashlights during the set.  Subsequent Canadian dates have been sell-outs, with even non-obsessives sensing something changing in the air (including my bloke-ish cousin, visiting from New Zealand, who proclaimed himself a Red Hot Chili Peppers fan at 9 p.m. but a converted Arcade Fire enthusiast by midnight).  In the same way that Broken Social Scene and the Constantines swept the informed Canadian masses and became everyone’s new favourite band before breaking in the all-important U.S., the Arcade Fire have reached the centre of a similar maelstrom.  As such, the buildup for their first full-length album grew from a regional slowburn to a massive blaze of biblical-style devotion by jaded and fickle rock fans everywhere.  The band released an EP previous to Funeral, which was impressive in its own right, but in retrospect a necessary precursor to the epic full-length.

The band’s two stalwarts, married couple Win Butler and Regine Chassagne, lead Richard Parry, William Butler, Tim Kingsbury and Howard Billerman (as well as a bevy of string players, including Owen Pallett and Michael Olsen) in a rotating swirl of instruments and poses.  While the album stands up to anything else like it on its own, it is in the mesmerizing live performance that Arcade Fire “burns” most gloriously.  Through fun (but actually rather serious) costuming and forceful stage presence, the band transforms the material and their audience.  They manage in both recorded and live formats to be utterly severe in their artistic convictions, but their talent and vision saves them from anything resembling parody.  It’s a gamble well made.

Four songs (tracks 1, 2, 4, and 5) are entitled “Neighborhood” with individual subtitles. Together, they are the sonic centerpiece of Funeral.  The album opener “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” sounds like what a night in old Montreal feels like, in all its richness and cold impenetrability, a city of brown corduroy and Crown Royal.  The ambitious rhythms, best played very loudly, and the reverberations of Butler’s voice offer the first sense that Funeral might emerge as something original.  “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)” features both arty and traditional veins of rock, what with adamant, dramatic screams layered over lovely string arrangements and basic rock and roll elements like tattered guitars.  “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” is the danciest, most enthused track, and perhaps one of the best, and “Neighbourhood #4 (Kettles)” is the first breath of mourning that threads its way throughout the album.  

On “Crown of Love,” Win Butler sounds like a baby Bruce Springsteen in a five-seater boozecan.  The track is a sleepy, hallucinogenic love song, and is in subject a departure from the broader themes of Funeral, but musically very much in line with the scheme of the whole album.  Fittingly, the real call to arms of Funeral appears on the next track, the magnificent “Wake Up”. 

“Haiti” is a sweeping, aquatic dream, sung in Chassagne’s fantastical, stinging voice.  “Haiti” is the sleeper of the album - in fifty years, we’ll all be playing this at our own friends’ funerals.  In “Rebellion (Lies)”, the opening lines “Sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is/ Sleeping is giving in, so lift those heavy eyelids” share “Haiti”’s ethos of the here, the now, and the inevitability of our collective demise.

“In the Backseat” begins with a plucky tune and weaving vocals, its lyrics a bounty of meaning about the route and direction of a life.  This is, however, nearly irrelevant in the face of the cinematic instrumentation, which grows into a searing climax and scrambled finale, a fitting and dramatic kabuki opera of noise and promise of what might be to come from this exceptional band. 

The significance of this album cannot be overstated - it’s not even a matter of preference, really, much in the way that Revolver demands appreciation even if the sound somehow doesn’t appeal to one’s personal senses. There are umpteen albums that serve to somehow characterize the bizarre and shifting post-millennial, post-everything culturally concerned existence, but every generation needs a touchstone. And for now, Funeral will dutifully serve as ours.

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