It’s been twenty years since the release of Funeral, Arcade Fire’s debut album. Back in 2004, my life was just beginning, but also already in shambles, and it seems almost too obvious in retrospect that an album like this would resonate with me; an album about the innocence of youth, the loss of it, and the wild search for meaning that follows.

Funeral effectively changed music, and the internet, forever. I don’t know how much hyperbole I can truly spew for an album that seems so ubiquitous to the music history of people my age, it is like singing the praises of water, of air. Funeral composes a bit of everyone who has been listening to it for the past two decades. It is woven into the fabric of our lives, even if it was just one step on a long and evolving musical journey.

Arcade Fire would go on a long and evolving musical journey of their own, right out of my zone of interest by their fourth album, and they’d commit a series of faux pas around cultural appropriation in the process of expanding their style (26 years late to “world music”), losing much of their cool points in the process. Thankfully, the nice thing about recorded music is that it persists even long after the artists have stumbled their way out of the spotlight (or just our spotlight).

Unfortunately, a lot of the other things that were great about the internet in 2004 are decaying, abandoned, or simply gone forever. 2007 saw the launch of the iPhone, which would hasten the ubiquity of social media in a very unpredictable way. If you want to communicate with others on the internet these days, you didn’t post on a personal blog, you post on social media, shouting into a void of impermanence. We don’t go looking for the pretentious opinions of music critics anymore, we look for opinions of the masses–Pitchfork, which was so influential to the music indie scene, is being “absorbed” into GQ, whatever that means, but it doesn’t sound like something that happens to a still-beloved institution.

I hate to swerve another post into old man complaining about the modern age, but if I revived this blog after more than a decade, it only seems appropriate to reflect on what has changed in that time. And it seems like a lot of things have gone to shit since then, which is impressive because 2004 was not just a depressing year for myself personally, but for many people in America–the Bush administration was really getting us down: Green Day’s American Idiot was released just a week after Funeral, and in the years surrounding we’d get Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero, Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Neil Young’s Living with War, and Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, several other albums preoccupied with our pessimistic political moment in the mid-aughts.

And yet, here we are, twenty years later, and it feels like we’ve come full circle. The political landscape is more divisive than ever before, and we barely even have a handful of truly great protest albums to lean on. The internet, which used to be a safe haven for the weirdos and freaks in the world, has now become a battleground for the attention spans of angsty mouth-breathers. The people who are in their 20’s currently aren’t listening to raw, energetic indie rock like Arcade Fire, but (warning: going to shout at clouds now) terrible mass manufactured bedroom pop built a top of mountain of reused samples and borrowed nostalgia. They’re screaming at endless derivatives of Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, who are singing almost exclusively about their past, present, and future ex-boyfriends; that are thrown onto Saturday Night Live for a live performance before their song stops trending in TikTok posts, and then disappear, never to be heard from again.

I hate it. But, you know, I can listen to Funeral, and I can imagine a time when it seemed like the bright light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t an oncoming freight train, but a friend’s house, a warm place to spend the night. Maybe we’re on the precipice of this happening again, an age where popular music doesn’t feel so hollow and self-obsessed. But if pop music is a mirror, we’re pretty well fucked, because as far as I can tell our society isn’t veering away from superficiality anytime soon.

Damn! I tried to end on a positive note… but how can I?

Oh well. See you in another twenty years, for the fortieth anniversary.

I don't know why I keep saying I'll do things when I should know by now the chance is that I probably won't. So instead of a week of me dissing music, you now get me slathering copious amounts of praise all over the Arcade Fire.

When I find out someone isn't familiar with the Arcade Fire, I normally preface anything by saying that they are the best "indie" band working today. I've never been to an Arcade Fire show; I've never worn one of their t-shirts, but as far as I'm concerned, as of today, they've released three pretty much flawless albums and that is truly something amazing.

The Suburbs might just be their best album yet. It's supposed to be something of a concept album, or at least that's what everyone keeps calling it, but it's not really. (At least not in the sense that there is an actual story to it, like The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, but maybe in the sense that there is a central conceit to the album. Perhaps it's a "conceit album".) It's more a collection of songs united by the anxiety that growing up middle class in the suburbs can do to you. It's also about hating the people who live there, now.

That's probably part of what I like about The Suburbs, that it deals with topics that I'm already concerned with. The whole album is soaked in anxiety, a perpetual dread that it's too late to cure ourselves and that we've wasted our time in the modern world when we could have been doing something... something... what? Something more wholesome? It's hard to know, because we wasted it, and we don't get that chance again.

The other emotional side of the record is Win Butler's apparent anger over the "fan" reaction to Neon Bible, or just the general hipster fanbase in general. "Rococo" (this song), and "Month of May" are pretty much blatant condemnations of the pretentious teens to twenty-somethings who all stand at their shows with their arms folded tight. Listening to Win in this NPR interview from April he makes a sarcastic comment about how nothing on The Suburbs lives up to "Tunnels", totally betraying how wounded he probably is over how so many people trashed Neon Bible. A review I read said they couldn't like The Suburbs because Win spends so much time "flipping everyone off". Well, as far as I'm concerned, it's his right, and anger makes for good music.

But most of all, The Suburbs is just a beautiful album. It's a little down in the dumps, emotionally, which is just great for me right now because I'm pretty much way down in the dumps, but that doesn't take away from the intensity or power of the record. I pretty much love it.

Vinyl vs. CD

The version of Rococo I'm posting here is from the vinyl release of the album. It's worth nothing that the CD version and the vinyl differ in track listing, that difference being that "Suburban War" appears at the end of the vinyl edition while the CD edition ends with "Sprawl II". This change subtly affects the entire record. The CD version has a distinct (I think) two parter feel, with "Suburban War" closing the first half and "Month of May" opening the second half. I listened to the album 10 times this way before moving onto the vinyl. The vinyl feels more straight through, with a slight lull in the middle, and the end feels significantly more contemplative.

"Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" is worth discussing all by itself. In that NPR interview I linked to above, Win or Will say that this album contains "the best Regine track ever" and they are so correct. I would post Mountains Beyond Mountains but unfortunately someone posted it on Hype Machine just yesterday and I don't want to be like that. Besides, MBM is such a good song that posting it is basically ruining the end of the album for you, which is so epic I feel kind of like it really would be a dramatic spoiler.

The way Mountains Beyond Mountains sculpts the end of the album on the CD in contrast to the vinyl is pretty dramatic. The Suburbs isn't necessarily an easy listening experience (two songs made me want to cry the first couple of times I heard them) but MBM puts a uplifting spin on the whole experience. It actually sounds kind of like there's a weird form of hope found in losing all hope by the end. It's just a beautiful, powerful song and it raises the whole album to an even higher level.

The vinyl loses this kick at the end. The song is still great, but by being followed by "Suburban War" takes a lot of the hope out of the album, and the closing "The Suburbs (Continued)" sucks even more out of it. As a whole the vinyl just seems to be a quieter record (due to the better mix).

If you want me to pick which one you should listen to first, I'm not sure. I think the CD is paced better, and an uplifting ending is better than a tranquil one. Fall in love with the CD, like I did, and then move onto the vinyl?

I find it really hard to believe that there are people out there who don't like Neon Bible. I was hyped for months waiting for its release, and when it finally dropped I fell pretty much in love with it (despite bemoaning how terrible the final mix of the album was, and The Suburbs sounds like it, too, is going to have a terrible muddy mix and that's just what they like I guess).

I was browsing a few music blogs on hype machine yesterday and ran across some post insulting this song, the title track that has leaked, and all of Neon Bible. Even the comments on the entries were saying things to the effect of, "Yeah those first two songs sounded like Neon Bible, and that's too bad, because it's pretty clear to everyone Funeral is the only good Arcade Fire album."

Now, maybe I'm just a true believer, but I don't think Arcade Fire has released a bad album. Hell, I don't think they've made a bad song. I'm not a massive Arcade Fire fan, I haven't even gone to one of their shows, but if someone were to corner me and ask me who the most consistently great indie band working today, I'd say it was the Arcade Fire. They might not be my personal favorite, but damn, I couldn't think of a better band if I tried really hard.

I've been pretty hooked on "Month of May". The song has a lot going for it, that I'm surprised so many people seem to miss. First up, it's really easy to sing "twenty twenty twenty-four hours agooooo" during the opening bars, and that's awesome because it's almost a incidental meta-reference or something. Secondly, it feels kind of like "(Anarchist Television Blues)" which is a damn good thing, but except for channeling Bruce Springsteen this is more, well, Ramones by way of Joan Jett or something.

The way "around and around and around" loses steam and fades from shouting into Regine's soft vocal. The delayed "arms ... folded ... tight" makes me imagine that the band have arm gestures to go with the song and that just makes me want to see them live. I love the subtle violin and synth that lurk in the background of the whole song at times. I only ever subconsciously notice the ending 'freak out' section that gets all sinister, but at the end I come to and I wonder what it's all about.

Don't even get me started on the subject matter of the song, with the kids, and their damn folded arms at all those damn indie shows, and how it makes me realize in some ways I'm still just a kid, trying to lift the weight I feel with my arms folded tight. Some things are pure, and some things are right, but I'm still standing with my arms folded tight.

Anyway, despite the weirdness of the other two songs leaked ("Ready to Start" and "We Used To Wait" both featuring unique vocals), I'm reasonably certain that The Suburbs is easily going to be as good as Neon Bible and Funeral. Maybe I've somehow been brainwashed, but I'm reasonably certain that Arcade Fire can do no wrong.

I love the story of this song, the parallels between being trapped because of your greed and because of your selflessness. It goes something like this: the poor wolf (or, boy, singer of song) who was lured into the well by a cunning fox (or, hot sexy girl, decidedly not the girl singing in this song), laments his sorry state of living, only to be resurrected as a lighthouse worker, who feels still trapped by his personal responsibility for potential shipwrecks.

Only one person on SongMeanings mentions Karma in a glancing blow, saying it's more Eastern karma than Christian karma and I don't know anything about that. I do know that it makes sense, that your resurrection / rebirth should, in some way, be funny and punishing. How apropos is it that the foolish wolf / Win Butler / boy who couldn't even take care of himself is reborn / resurrected / reincarnated as someone who has to take care of loads of other people?

They're all lessons learned. What Dreams May Come (the book, not the Robin Williams movie) touches on this a little bit. Massive spoilers: at the end when the guy saves the girl, the people in charge go: "Yeah, that's great and everything, but no," and force reincarnation, and because she killed herself with sleeping pills, she has to go back as some African girl with chronic insomnia her whole life. How great is that!

So just think about that next time you think about how miserable you are. Maybe you did something really lousy in a past life that you're paying for now in some warped and twisted way.* Try to enjoy it!

Not that I believe any of that. You never know, though.

* This is all kind of fun because you can look at really gross fat people, the kind of fat people that make you feel sad, and then think that they were probably really vapid super models who OD'd on tons of coke, or, you know, rich beautiful people who lived selfish beautiful lives and now they are fat and sweating in motorized wheelie carts because their sugar-laden insulin-deprived feet are too numb to carry their gigantic diabetic asses around. With that kind of thinking you don't feel sad for them any more, and can spit on them with ease. Just like it should be.

No respect for land monsters.

Site Note: Hey, look, it's the Feburary 2009 playlist! Where'd that come from?