100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)

02 Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)

03 Une Année Sans Lumière

04 Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)

05 Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)

06 Crown of Love

07 Wake Up

08 Haiti

09 Rebellion (Lies)

10 In the Backseat

If ever there was a record to not judge by its title, it’s Arcade Fire’s Funeral. On their debut album, the exiled siblings from Texas and their fellow Canadian conspirators turned in a blistering, exhilarating celebration of life’s rich if uncertain potential. On a record that dips repeatedly and deeply into memory, and which was titled following the deaths of several band members’ relatives during recording, Funeral turns out to be about those who live on. In an era when ’80s revivalism was becoming codified, the album arrived like a liberating army. So much more felt possible after these 10 songs had left their indelible mark.

There were six of them, tied tightly by bonds formal and otherwise. Win Butler was the chief songwriter and co-vocalist; Régine Chassagne his fellow singer, multi-instrumentalist and wife; Howard Bilerman was the drummer. Butler’s younger brother William, Timothy Kingsbury and Richard Reed Parry all played too many instruments to keep a clear count of. They were unpredictable, like their music.

The Butlers had come via school in Boston and the band had subsequently gone through various members and mêlées between 2001 and 2003, when they began recording Funeral. The group’s gentlemen favoured a sartorial look best described as elite Bulgarian border guard circa 1931, but formality made few other claims on the record, which exploded internationally and took Arcade Fire from Canadian clubs to the main stage of international festivals in less than a year.

Voices were everywhere on these songs, with Win Butler’s impassioned squawk finding fervour as it was shaded first by Chassagne and then caught up in the congregational swell of his bandmates. Tracks such as the opening ‘Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)’ swept you up, but they didn’t ascend into airy inconsequentiality. Butler imagines a snowed-in town, as he digs a tunnel from his parents’ home to that of his beloved, and the band’s off-kilter rhythms and sawing textures recreate that world, drawing higher and higher above the memory as the protagonists enter adulthood.

Childhood would become a formal, distant concept on later Arcade Fire albums, but on Funeral the past threatens to overwhelm the present as the songs go to wonderful, unexpected places with a lightness of touch and offhand charm that belies the elemental forces they summon. ‘Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)’ made the effect transcendent, as Butler’s treated vocal sits at odds with the raw strings as the lyric recalls an older brother defined by the disruptions he caused, both in presence and then absence. By the song’s end, with a doleful accordion refrain circling, the sibling and his father are fighting and the police car lights suggest a disco.

Part of the album’s appeal rested in the uncertainty over whether Arcade Fire were the heaviest folk band or the most fragile rock group around. Stringed instruments gradually coalesce on the redemptive ‘Crown of Love’, while the opening thump of ‘Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)’ ushered in a song whose subterranean rumble and ecstatic disco backbeat suggested a peculiar offshoot of early New Order. ‘Look at ’em go,’ demands Butler repeatedly on the latter, and he could be easily talking about his bandmates.

‘If the children don’t grow up/Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up,’ Butler sang on ‘Wake Up’, a song that could fill a stadium but retained a hold on intimacy – ‘Haiti’ in turn enveloped an entire troubled country (Chassagne’s family had fled the Duvalier family’s regime). There was little Funeral tried that did not only come together easily, but also felt intrinsically right. The songs moved too fast and too far for the drama to become staged, and the passion became euphoric and empowering.