School, career, friendships, family, romance, politics, sports: In the fall of 2004, these were trivialities, minor disturbances that kept me from my life’s true purpose at the time. Which was listening to Arcade Fire’s Funeral. This was a rare, yet familiar feeling, one I also experienced with Kid A and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — albums that somehow outshined their blinding comet trail of purely online advance hype, rendering the print world of circumspect four-star reviews obsolete, incapable of recognizing the canon being assembled in real time.
A few days after the release of Funeral — 20 years ago this Saturday — Athens, Georgia was hit by a storm that cut electricity throughout Clarke County. There was nothing left to do but pull out my Discman and listen to “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out),” literally with the power out. Divine intervention! God had seen my life plan and deemed it was good. This is what it could feel like listening to Arcade Fire in 2004.
Talking this way about any album can be downright embarrassing outside of a LiveJournal, let alone for a commissioned piece of music criticism. Doing so for Arcade Fire can feel irresponsible in 2024. The trajectory from Funeral to 2011 Grammy Album Of The Year is steep but sensible, the result of a band applying their brute force emotionality to bigger subjects and bigger budgets. In the ensuing decade, Arcade Fire had already forfeited most of their goodwill with clunky, exhausting album rollouts that desperately tried to control their narrative and proved them incapable of doing anything other than following the U2 PR playbook page by page: dance-rock rebrand, arch pop culture metacommentary, reapplying to be the world’s biggest band.
The accusations leveled against Win Butler in 2022 were galling on their own merits, but especially so given the air of piety that Arcade Fire had cultivated throughout most of their career, especially on their protracted “return to form” WE. It gave credence to what the negative reviews could hint at without really saying: Maybe these guys were always full of shit.
If that’s where you stand with Arcade Fire right now, I respect it. And indeed, a lot of qualities that were true of WE were true of Funeral: Arcade Fire are bombastic, indulgent, cringe. They are tryhards. But I’ve got all of these formative, undeniable experiences from 20 years ago that hold up even if the people responsible for them failed. And even if Funeral is still an album I turn to for the remembrance of the feeling, rather than the feeling itself, there’s a frisson to it that fascinates me even more in 2024 than it did in 2004: The Biggest Thing In Indie Rock was a band that everyone agreed was profoundly uncool in every single way.
I’m not talking about the twee costumery, which was hardly in short supply in The Year That Freak Folk Broke. But Arcade Fire lacked the outsider cachet of Joanna Newsom or Animal Collective or Fiery Furnaces; even if The Milk-Eyed Mender or Sung Tongs or Blueberry Boat blew your mind, you’d also have to acknowledge they had the capability to clear the room. After Franz Ferdinand, Hot Fuss, and Desperate Youths, Blood Thirsty Babes, one couldn’t say that rock bands lacked populist ambition in 2004. However, all of the aforementioned were, in some way, extensions of the New Rock Revolution and its cosmopolitan ethos. Arcade Fire were from Montreal and occasionally sang in French, but they were the band with The Guy With The Helmet. Actually, two Guys With The Helmet. Whether or not you fully buy into 2004 being an era of indie sleaze or Peak Twee (or, in the case of Tilly And The Wall’s debut album, both), Arcade Fire’s visions of love and danger and rebellion stood out for their childlike whimsy: “We can live on misbehavior” was about as debauched as things got.
While most bands subject to such instantaneous critical acclaim are typically called “fully formed,” Arcade Fire felt pubescent, a band overwhelmed by staggering emotions too big for their bodies, expressed as if they were the first ones to ever feel them. Ten years ago, Chris DeVille described Funeral as the “worst-produced” Arcade Fire album, and that’s true if you’re trying to test out high-end stereo equipment. From Neon Bible forward, Arcade Fire has been an indie band by technicality, and by Reflektor, they were actively hiding their relationship with Capitol Records. Yet Funeral doesn’t exactly sound like an indie rock record from 2004. It sounds like one from 1998, not that far removed from what Bright Eyes or Neutral Milk Hotel or Modest Mouse were doing at the time.
The sound of Funeral is defined by limitations, full of clipping, compression, levels being pushed into the red — the irresistible force of Arcade Fire’s yearning for transcendence meets the immovable object of death. The most powerful moments of Funeral show their exertion and exhaustion and pretty much every single moment is powerful. The gang vocals of “Wake Up” are only effective when it sounds like a limited number of people in a limited space trying to make the maximum amount of noise; the subsequent decade of “ho hey” festival bands turned it into a cheat code. Even if “No Cars Go” appeared on the self-titled EP that preceded Funeral, saving it for Neon Bible feels far more apt: a song that clean and propulsive wouldn’t have fit amongst “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” and “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out),” where Win Butler sounds like he’s towing the entire band trailer with his bare hands. When they’re finally able to shed themselves from the weight of the world, “Une Anee Sans Lumiere” and “Crown Of Love” immediately whip themselves into double-time victory laps. Even the album’s most sedate (and thus, least essential) track still replicates the sound of a tea kettle ready to boil over.
As for what it’s about in a literal sense, I gathered from the lore that it was inspired by the death of several family members (and also, it’s called Funeral). It doesn’t seem to be about any of those deaths. I couldn’t specify what most of the songs were about really, though at a point in my life where Where You Want To Be and Futures were in steady rotation, the atomic self-pity of “Crown Of Love” connected most squarely. I wonder if any English speakers could clock the profound grief of Régine Chassagne’s showcase “Haiti” if it had any other title.
The content of Arcade Fire’s message mattered far less than its delivery, expressing capital-e Emotions with such intensity that it blots out everything in existence. A snow-capped Montreal might as well be an apocalyptic wasteland or a new Eden. Depression feels like a dog trapped in a space shuttle. Learning how to operate a motor vehicle is like slowly getting a glimpse into the face of god. A single candle can burn with the power in the hearts of all men.
Okay, now I’m starting to sound like the original Pitchfork review, which we do have to discuss. Its language might not be as florid as their Kid A 10.0, but it’s close. More importantly, because the review ran several days before the release, it directly resulted in many, many record stores being unable to keep Funeral in stock. Remember how disoriented people were when they had to download a .zip file or go to YouTube to hear that Cindy Lee album everyone was talking about? Imagine if you had to wait several days or even a week to hear it at all. (Side note: In a time when people grouse about reviews not moving the needle anymore, it baffles me why publications don’t publish them weeks in advance.)
Even if the actual influence of Arcade Fire would take a few years to germinate, its impact on how indie rock could be discussed felt immediate and seismic. Listen to the albums the Decemberists and Okkervil River and Sufjan Stevens and Broken Social Scene and the National and the New Pornographers made in 2003. By that point, each had established a strong identity. Now listen to the ones they made in 2005. They all sound bigger, bolder, hungrier. Rookies Of The Year like Bloc Party and Wolf Parade were swinging for the fences from the first pitch. This could have happened with or without Funeral, but talking correlation vs. causation is academic: The game was different now.
A vulnerability hangover was inevitable. While Funeral predictably finished #1 in Pitchfork’s 2004 year-end list, less than three months later, it plummeted to #45 in their half-decade retrospective, right behind Deerhoof and Mclusky. By the time the 2000s list ran, Funeral had vaulted back to #2. “Something tells me that as music becomes even more readily available to us in the next decade, we’ll still go through it all in the hopes we can find something with the unifying force and astounding emotional payload that only albums like Funeral can provide,” I wrote in that blurb. And in the time since, I’ve learned to avoid the royal “we” whenever possible, because that’s what people do when they lack the guts to say “I” or “me,” like they really mean to.
Speaking of which, amidst the fevered house style of Pitchfork ca. 2004, this line from the original review still stands out: “We forget that ‘emo’ was once derived from emotion, and that in our buying and selling of personal pain, or the cynical approximation of it, we feel nothing.” I don’t know who “we” is here. Arcade Fire couldn’t seem to figure it out either. Around the same time Reflektor confirmed a greater cultural break with the first phase of Obama-core shaped by Arcade Fire, the “emo revival” started to generate mainstream attention on the strength of records like Whenever, If Ever, The Albatross, and Owel’s self-titled. Ironically, they sounded very little like Cap’n Jazz or Sunny Day Real Estate but felt a lot like Funeral – the “How are you gonna fit everyone on stage?” lineups, the glockenspiels and accordions, the alternately tuned guitars, the one dude who can’t really sing on-key but can sing with passion, the female lead singer who actually can sing. Even if I vehemently disagree with Stereogum’s Premature Evaluation of WE [Editor’s note: No one agrees with it], I can respect the need for something to fill that void. Fortunately, recent years have spawned a veritable subgenre of “Arcade Fire without Arcade Fire,” including Gang Of Youths and Caracara and Fireworks and Ants From Up There.
I was hoping the halo effect of Funeral and a healthy amount of distance might help me revisit Arcade Fire’s recent work with fresh ears — especially Everything Now, seven years removed from a historically alienating album rollout, a streak of unforced errors whose recent parallels lay not in music but in the recent political campaigns of Ron DeSantis and J.D. Vance. If you thought Everything Now was terrible in 2017 but suspected you might’ve been unduly swayed by Stereoyum, good news: You were right back then, it’s still terrible. In particular, I still can’t believe this lyric from “Creature Comfort”: “Assisted suicide/ She dreams about dying all the time/ She told me she came so close/ Filled up the bathtub and put on our first record.”
I’ve rolled this line over and over in my head — does Win Butler view Arcade Fire’s most passionate fans as no different than the camgirls and influencers he castigates throughout “Creature Comfort”? Or were Arcade Fire willing to sacrifice their uniquely intense connection with their audience to go all-in on cynicism as a pose? Which one is worse? I’m inclined to say the latter, given how sharply they tried to course correct on WE. Their cynicism may have been unconvincing, but now their sincerity couldn’t be trusted either. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of “Creature Comfort”‘s failure is that Matty Healy — no stranger to ham-fisted toggling between sincerity and cynicism — handled the same exact situation with grace and empathy less than a year later on “Give Yourself A Try” (“Jane took her own life at 16/ She was a kid who had the box tattooed on her arm”).
In the time since, I’ve thought about how the inevitable Arcade Fire apology tour might go. They’ve already quietly booked a couple of festival gigs without much blowback. The days of headlining Coachella or even considering an arena tour are long gone, but I don’t need to name names as far as presumably canceled artists who kept doing brisk business on the road after the heat died down. Maybe they’ll make a stripped down comeback album with Rick Rubin that will allude to Butler’s misdeeds without getting into specifics. Maybe it’ll even be sorta good, but I can never go back to siding with the guy who wrote “Creature Comfort” over the people in the lyrics — the people for whom Funeral truly felt like a matter of life and death.
