Arcade Fire - Funeral (320) (2004)

Now that Mandatory Metal Monday is over, we can get back to some real *coughcough* music.

I couldn't believe it when Dubious told me he had never heard this album. Although it has gotten to the point where this album has gotten overhyped in some places, make no mistake: Funeral is one of the top 10 albums of the decade.

I love albums that invoke that sort of coming-of-age melancholy: as children, most of us grow up thinking the world will be so much better when we're older, when we'll actually be able to do "stuff," when we're not limited by our parents and held back by the frustrating rules and overbearing authority figures. Then we do grow up and slowly realize that, while we thought life would get better as adults, in fact, it's the opposite. Instead, there are just more rules, more responsibilities, more roles to assume. And for those of us who spent our adolescence dreaming of the freedom of adulthood, it's depressing to realize that we spent the freest years of our lives dreaming of a day that will never come. Bands such as The National are absolute masters of channeling this frustration and bitterness into music. Arcade Fire's debut deals with similar themes. Take the closing track, In The Backseat, where Régine Chassagne concisely sums up what we're all feeling or have felt at some point:

I like the peace
In the backseat
I don't have to drive
I don't have to speak
I can watch the countryside
And I can fall asleep
I've been learning how to drive
My whole life
I've been learning

Win Butler echoes these feelings on the track Wake Up (used in the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are) when he emphatically declares that:

If the children don't grow up
Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up
We're just a million little gods causing rainstorms
Turning every good thing to rust
I guess we'll just have to adjust

But don't let this album fool you in thinking it deals only with the issues of adulthood realization: it also slaloms between issues such as love and loss, the passage and power of time, and, particularly, death. Each song seems to address the concept of death, even if it is not always a physical death. Death of a soul, death of a society, death of a romance. It's no coincidence the album is titled Funeral. And yet it's not a gothic album, as there always does remain a thread of optimism, however slight. But don't expect these Canadian indie pioneers to spoil the answers of life: we never do find out what happens to any of our protagonists in this song. Indeed, as the aforementioned lyrics of the closer In The Backseat indicate, even by the end of this journey through love and death and introspection, we still are hovering awkwardly between the driver's seat we are supposed to assume and the peaceful backseat we inwardly crave and feel at home in.

You better look out below!