I don’t think I ever would have picked this album up on my own (for reasons detailed below), but I’m glad I got it. My brother- and sister-in-law got it for me for Christmas 2019. Christmas was a lucrative vinyl season. I guess people heard about the turntable and went all in. All the results were winners, though, so no complaints.
I don’t have strong feelings about Arcade Fire. Or maybe I didn’t have strong feelings about Arcade Fire? They were a band that rose to popularity during a weird little musical break for me. In 2004, I had moved to Philadelphia. I didn’t know anyone who lived there and Napster wasn’t a thing anymore.
For my college years, a combination of friends and the Wild West of content sharing had given me all sorts of new bands to enjoy. I went to a Phish concert in Ohio and watched as people chucked glow-in-the-dark bracelets around a stadium while a pudgy man played music with a vacuum.
I went up to Montreal and saw Suicide Machines play a little club with ceiling fans that whirred along inches about the heads of crowdsurfing Canadian kids. In Plattsburg, I listened to a Pink Floyd cover band while a girl who was off her gourd on whatever drug she’d picked up tried to take a nap on my friend’s lap.
I just dug out more details about that Suicide Machines show. It was at a place called Rainbow in Montreal in 2000. If you want to understand the vibe a bit more, you can watch a video of Earth Crisis from around the same time.
I went up with this guy from my freshman dorm. His handle online was Yukigem, which was the kind of ping pong paddle rubber he prefered smashed together with the name of a girl he had a crush on (Meg) backwards.
Anyways, we drove up in the March cold to Montreal and probably ate some dive food. I imagine we went to a bar because he wasn’t 21, but you can drink at 18 in Canada. So every time I went across the border, we ended up in a bar for a while.
Then we walked up a flight of stairs in the middle of seeming nowhere to this crazy, packed, overheated venue. There were kids everywhere. I remember thinking it must have been an all ages show. As soon as the opening band kicked up, everyone went bananas. We were bigger than all these kids and we got just surged right up front.
So we’re pressed up near the stage, watching this incredible punk band while 15 year olds kick their legs over our heads and within inches (probably feet) of the fans. The fans which do fuck all to cool the place down because how could they? It’s teeming with dirty punk kids all going a million miles a minute.
Late-90s punk bands had this weird energy on stage. They all looked like they’d never not been moving, all sinew and muscle and buzzed heads and body fat percentages well below 3%. At the same time, those guys had all the coordination of a drunk iguana. Go back and watch. Lead singers jump up at weird times and their limbs just flail around. It’s mesmerizing.
Four years after that show, we’d moved to Philly (Bryn Mawr, really), and I stopped discovering new music, with two exceptions. My coworker at Williams-Sonoma would listen to just about anything with a new wave ancestor, and he pushed them all my way. The Crimea, The Bravery, Louis XIV, Moving Units, Interpol, and on and on. I liked a lot of those.
In London, I ended up listening to a lot of Moving Units and Bloc Party, which I lump together for no good reason. Like Christian Bale and Rudyard Kipling. They’re glued together in my brain for some reason, but Lord knows why.
The other music injection I got came from Nate, my coworker from the campaign I was working on. Nate was a local boy and he loved some emo. I’d been to a few emo concerts in college, but mainly to see opening bands. I saw OK Go open for somebody. Ash opened for some other band. I’d usually leave after the band I liked played.
Saves the Day and Plain White T’s. That’s who Ash played with when I saw them in Buffalo in 2002. I now wish I’d stuck around for Plain White T’s. Ah well.
Nate mainly got me into Brand New, which was a long time favorite and which will feature in a future entry, as I own at least one of their albums on vinyl. He also got me into Dashboard Confessional, which I really just like the one album from. But I really like that album.
All of this musical intrigue meant that I missed out on Arcade Fire. I think friends back in Tallahassee got into them, but it never trickled down to me. As a result, I couldn’t have recognized any of their songs until about a year ago.
Spotify has made music much more accessible and explorable. The indie playlists and ‘radio’ stations are constantly tucking Arcade Fire songs into the mix. I’ve become well acquainted with Wake Up and Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels). Both lovely songs.
My lingering hesitation with Arcade Fire is the lead singer’s earnestness. Win Butler is a very open dude in his songwriting and singing, which is probably great, but it’s not for me. I know that’s not a fair assessment of the music and I know it flies in the face of lots of other very earnest music that I listen to.
My point, with the earlier nonsense, was to highlight that I wasn’t listening to Funeral when it was supposed to be listened to. If you go back and read reviews from the time, you’ll see that they all talk about the relevance of album for 2004. A rebirth of indie rock, a sadness from being in middle America, a generation of lost kids trying to find their way and having nothing to support them but old Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, all tucked into a plastic bag. Maybe not that last bit.
It’s like reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time when you’re 37. Holden Caulfield is a whiney jackass. When you’re 17, he’s still a jackass, but he’s also a lot like you in the ways that you wish you could explain. When you’re employed and a homeowner, you’re less impressed by his approach to life.
Since I didn’t connect with it back then, I’m not sure I can now. That said, I really enjoy the record. It sounds nice on vinyl and it’s well-divided, with Neighborhoods #1 – #4 on side A and the rest of the tracks on B. Also, Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) is a pretty banging tune.