Arcade Fire

Funeral

Funeral is like nothing you've heard before, and altogether familiar. Funeral comforts and cares, marches and dares, and towers over us with its anthemic choruses and orchestral arrangements.

These are songs that pump blood back into the heart as fast and furiously as it's draining from the sleeve on which it beats

The scorched soul of these 10 songs shines like a winter sun, bright against the gloom of the loss that inspired it.

The Montreal indie squad use forms rooted in tradition, from violin-drenched waltzes to dusty acoustic folk, from doo-wop to calypso, and give them a theatrical pomo twist.

This is the debut of the millennium, and I cannot describe just how much you need it in your life.

It's taken perhaps too long for us to reach this point where an album is at last capable of completely and successfully restoring the tainted phrase "emotional" to its true origin.

Funeral, is so fresh and exciting it's hard to believe they are operating in an old and potentially stale form. Not only are the songs uniformly excellent, they also show a mastery of the art of controlled dynamics, of tension and release, that most young bands ignore to pursue the catharsis of sustained intensity.

Funeral ... is a realization of what they'd set out to practice with Arcade Fire, and is a resounding success on all levels -- the group clearly able to make something incredible out of the familiar, and something inexplicably moving out of one emotionally draining year.

The band has created an unquestionably sincere and autobiographical work of art, no matter how coded the lyrics prove at times. 

For those of us who still believe in music’s power to redeem, ‘Funeral’ feels like detox, the most cathartic album of the year.

For the most part, Funeral is a lovely, uplifting, and often pleasingly grandiose whirl through a panoply of sounds.

The band could have gone for a less direct title, but even then it would have been crystal clear: Funeral captures the agony and even ecstasy of surviving death all around you.