Funeral

iTunes Review

It’s easy enough to isolate Arcade Fire's musical influences (Bowie, Pixies, Talking Heads), but Funeral sounds like nothing and no one else. First of all, there’s the sheer bigness of the enterprise: we’re talking passion, of course, but also head count, an entire orchestra of indie urchins playing strings, accordion, keyboards, xylophone, organ, and guitar, the ferocious rhythm section holding things together each time they threaten to fly apart. Over the top of all this activity Win Butler’s anguished voice with its Ian McCulloch quaver yelps lyrics that are sometimes gloriously obscure, sometimes Up With People! Direct. Elsewhere, snow buries houses, neighbors dance in police disco lights, and unborn cousins haunt the dreams of Duvalier, while the music turns on a use of crescendo that’s almost shamanic in its intensity. With a last-minute tempo change the songs seem to take actual scalp-lifting flight; witness “Crown of Love,” which transforms from a swaying accordion waltz to the most unlikely of all disco anthems. Best of all is the death-haunted parable “In the Backseat.” Sounding something like Kate Bush possessed by the ghost of Francoise Hardy, Butler’s wife Regine Chassagne works her way to a wordless, grief-stricken wail only two-thirds of the way through, before the strings plink gently and gradually down to silence. Funeral is sheer rock-and-roll alchemy, inspired by death yet celebrating life.