Hating to love something is a complicated and frustrating emotion. When it comes to music, I prefer one of the following: to love an album unconditionally and make it a part of my life, despise it with a scorching passion, or just entirely forget about it altogether. Conflicting emotions and any sort of middle ground or grey area regarding an album makes the listening experience that much more maddening, which is exactly how I find Funeral.
Musically, it's obviously brilliant. A mix of Neutral Milk Hotel, Modest Mouse, and The Soft Bulletin that is grandiose and majestic without feeling the least bit self-indulgent or pompous. Most of the songs start off rather quiet and reserved, but eventually build up to a cathartic climax that is usually predictable, always exhilarating. Vocalist Win Butler's emotionally intense, but not at all emo, David Byrne-channeling performance acts as the ringleader for Funeral. He takes the listener through a variety of sentiments via crooning, shouting, whimpering, wailing, and doing just about everything else a great vocalist ought to. His wife Regine's best Bjork impression on the album's liberating final track, "In the Backseat," is nearly equally impressive.
The band's songwriting skill is as undeniable as The Shins'. It takes a very special group of people to create music that is essentially straightforward indie rock and make it as unique and memorable as possible; you will never mistake the Arcade Fire for another band or vice versa. The alternation between ominous, driving, instrumental sections (which evoke Pornography-era Cure in my opinion), lighthearted, glockenspiel-fueled verses, and choruses inflected with sweetly organic strings makes "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" arguably the album's best track. "Crown of Love" starts off as an endearingly sappy exercise in melodramatic, loved-and-lost ballads before abruptly morphing into an unforeseeable disco section (strings still included) that approaches the surreal for the last sixty seconds. "Wake Up" is easily the album's most glorious and bombastic track, reaching very near Soft Bulletin heights and containing the album's most thrilling moment: Butler shouting, with all the resolve his body can muster, "I guess we'll just have to adjust!" before exploding into another one of the song's huge choruses.
The key problem for me with Funeral is that, for an album that is so overwrought with emotion, I cannot connect to this on a personal level at all. Sure, I enjoy the music, but I don't feel like it's being made for me. Masterpieces in naked emotion such as Closer, Disintegration, and, heck, even Turn on the Bright Lights allow me, and a lot of other people, to forget that anyone else in the world exists and just wallow in my own personal petty despair. Funeral's emotion feels too detached and universal to truly connect to; nothing on the record feels really private or personal. It's like a Jimmy Eat World album, but with great music. Not that the score isn't a good rating, but if the Arcade Fire somehow found a way to convey the emotional content of their material more convincingly, their rating would certainly be higher in my book.
