I vividly remember when Arcade Fire’s debut album, Funeral, came out 20 years ago. My college buddy was doing an internship at a Fortune 500 company, and his colleague just happened to be a former member of a seminal indie band. What are the odds? This individual regularly chatted with my friend about music, and he claimed that my friend just had to check out this up-and-coming group called Arcade Fire.
With a band that obscure, I had to order the CD from Amazon (remember that media outlet?), as the Media Play down the street didn’t have it in stock. When it finally arrived, a handful of like-minded friends sat around my tiny bedroom apartment and listened to the record from top to bottom on my oversized stereo. We tried to point out this or that interesting aspect, but the group was largely underwhelmed. We looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and headed out to the bars without any further thought. However, in the following weeks, my friend and I stuck with it, and aren’t we glad we did?
My experience is to suggest that not everybody got it at first. Of course, we were just getting plugged into certain indie media outlets, like Pitchfork (which gave it a 9.7). The album likely received a different reception in more scholarly circles, but I would argue most listeners didn’t find Funeral earth-shattering. If they did find something special in those ten tracks, they would be hard-pressed to articulate why. After all, this was only a few short years after the garage rock resurgence, where rock and roll bands of a certain style were finally getting the attention they deserved (think turn-of-the-century bands with The in the name: The Black Keys, the Hives, the Kills, the Raveonettes, the Strokes, the Vines, the Walkmen, the White Stripes). Arcade Fire didn’t fit the mold of your prototypical rock band, and that disparity was even more pronounced in the early aughts.
Funeral can be a bit of a grower, in large part because it wasn’t so indebted to that which came before (like Interpol with Joy Division, the Strokes with the Cars, and the National with Leonard Cohen). Sure, Arcade Fire have been influenced by a host of acts we all know and love, such as David Bowie, Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen, and Roxy Music. Arcade Fire can even credit Bowie—who was an early champion of their work—for their meteoric rise. That is where the comparisons end because Arcade Fire are so unique: 15 members received credit on Funeral, but they were not a collective per se; they feature a husband-and-wife team of vocalists in Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, occasionally integrate French lyrics in their tracks when it suits the mood, and proudly display their Baroque-pop leanings with strings and horns. That all makes sense in retrospect, but it was a novel approach at the time.
The story behind Funeral has been shared repeatedly, but it’s worth a brief recap. Arcade Fire signed to Merge Records following their 2003 self-titled EP (also known as Us Kids Know, based on lyrics from the phenomenal “No Cars Go”). The main members at the time included Win Butler (vocals, guitars, piano, synthesizer, bass), Chassagne (vocals, drums, synthesizer, piano, accordion, xylophone, recorders), Richard Reed Perry (electric guitar, synthesizer, organ, piano), Tim Kingsbury (bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar), Howard Bilerman (drums, guitar), and William Butler (bass, xylophone, synthesizer, percussion). In other words, each member played a host of instruments, not all of which can be included here. A string of deaths took place within the following year that disrupted their forward trajectory. These included Chassagne’s grandmother, the Butlers’ grandfather, and Perry’s aunt. The band retreated to the studio and poured that grief into what would become Funeral.
If Arcade Fire’s 2010 effort, The Suburbs, directly ascribed what it was like to live in the burbs (in the Houston area in the case of the Butlers), Funeral provides fairytale-like renderings of that period. Four of the first five songs on the first side of the album are aptly titled “Neighborhood”: “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”, “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)”, “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”, and “Neighborhood #4 (Kettles)”. That’s a bold move for a progressive rock band from the 1970s, let alone an indie group releasing their debut record. The fact that the first three songs were their initial singles in order suggests somebody knew how big this album could be, especially considering the two biggest hits, “Rebellion (Lies)” and “Wake Up,” came later.
The fairy tale childhood, in this case, is not necessarily a happy one. It features nondescript-aged kids finding refuge amongst each other and the shared spaces they inhabit. Those places can be the literal bedrooms of their parents or the imagined space traversed from window to window. This metaphor finds a middle ground between two people singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from across the land and those in neighboring apartment buildings talking over string phones. These characters seek refuge from parents crying, emancipated siblings, neighbors shouting, and old people dying, images reflecting the mess of daily life.
The beauty and sorrow of Funeral exists in how it intertwines reality with the make-believe. Much of the album’s content deals with conflict and building a world that excludes adults and their tired ways. It regularly does so through figurative language that approximates poetry, as in “Neighborhood #4: Kettles”: “My eyes are covered by the hands of my unborn kids / But my heart keeps watching through the skin of my eyelids.”
Theirs is a universe where they can live together out in nature, as their hair grows long and their skin gets thicker, where they can forget the world as they know it (“Tunnels”). It is a dystopian place where kids are swinging from power lines and dying in the snow, with their parents frozen and unable to carry the figurative torch (“Power Out”). In their little enclave, the neighbors are innocent bystanders (like those dancing in police lights in “Lakia”) or are complicit in the chaos: “All the neighbors are starting a fire / Burning all the old folks, the witches and the liars” (“Kettles”). Therein lies the call to action on “Wake Up,” which is ultimately the need to adjust, to demonstrate growth, and to avoid the missteps of those that came before—not to be the cause of rain storms but to wield proverbial lightning bolts.
Funeral exists as a world unto itself as a concept, but also breaks new ground sonically. Arcade Fire seamlessly moves from loud to soft, with its members yelling one second and singing sweetly the next. Tempos can change at any given time, like on “Une Annee Sans Lumiere”, an ambling affair, before infusing some spirit, like legging out the last quarter-mile of a long run. Nothing compares to seeing them live to fully understand how the pieces fit together. However, doing so can be as disorienting as that first listen.
When playing live, Arcade Fire feature a front line of musicians (including strings), with Win Butler usually wearing a skinny tie and vest or suspenders in the center. Behind them on an elevated platform are horns and drums. In her usual colorful dress and 1980s gloves, Chassagne shifts between keyboard, accordion, and drums and moves about with her fellow multi-instrumentalists, sometimes serving as the focal point. There are enough microphones to go around, as nearly everybody contributes vocals, especially in the moments of catharsis. At times, all the members seem to be doing their own thing with reckless abandon, but they always come together when the timing is right.
Likewise, Funeral has a lot going on at any given moment. The complexity of a track like “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” feels that way due to the unifying elements of sound, with the bassline backbone, the symbol and snare drum combination, xylophone, violins, and numerous other elements that create synergy. Each track is finely orchestrated, even something so simple and sparingly beautiful, like “In the Backseat”, sung by Chassagne with every ounce of passion. That just goes to show how much Arcade Fire poured into Funeral as a studio album, which they could then enhance when in front of an audience.
Subsequent acts like Ra Ra Riot and the Antlers attempted to incorporate some of the elements established here but with only moderate success. Despite many attempts at revisionist history, the reality is that Funeral was not created in a vacuum. Many other groups, especially those from Canada, proved to be formidable contemporaries. A handful might even claim to be innovators of the very same qualifies we have come to affiliate with Arcade Fire. Some of those include Broken Social Scene (a collective of musicians with considerable live energy), the Dears (a husband and wife-led orchestral pop band known for their intensity), and Stars (a chamber pop act of equal parts beauty and melancholy—who coincidentally released their debut album on the same date). Funeral was a triumph, but it also proved to be a golden age for bands seeking new and sophisticated spaces outside the garage scene.
Beyond endless reappraisal, Funeral includes some of the best songs of the Arcade Fire catalog and even two of the greatest indie rock anthems. “Rebellion (Lies)” has as much staying power as a track like “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem. The opening, with the celebrated line “Sleeping is giving in / No matter what the time is”, sets the stage for the upbeat crowd-pleaser that follows. “Wake Up” is equally significant, as the “woah-oh-oh-oh” chorus has become one of the most iconic wordless refrains in rock music. The track’s battering crescendo would risk becoming overbearing if not for the cheery bridge and outro that follows.
Funeral arguably tops the list of the greatest indie albums of the 21st century. The case can be made for a handful of other albums (some might even argue for The Suburbs). Still, none could be so influential yet stand the test of time in its own right, especially considering the universality of its message. Funeral has grown bigger than itself as an idea of just how grand indie music can be, and it simultaneously exists as a unified piece of art from a time when Arcade Fire had little ambition beyond playing music that would touch their audience in an almost transcendent way.
Funeral is one of those rare feats that, because it exists, an album like it can never again be created. Thankfully, Arcade Fire didn’t attempt to do so on their follow-up Neon Bible (much to the chagrin of a subset of their fanbase—not unlike Radiohead fans who still long for another The Bends). As a result, Funeral remains a pristine artifact, the band’s collective purgation, made of one part innocence, one part cynicism, and all heart.