Arcade Fire: Funeral [SONY]

Why you'll love it

Funeral is one of the defining indie rock albums of the 2000s: big, cathartic, cry-and-sing-along songs about loss and growing up, with "Wake Up," "Rebellion (Lies)" and "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)."

This edition

• Single LP, 10 tracks
• Sony pressing

About the album

Arcade Fire recorded Funeral at Hotel2Tango in Montreal while several band members were losing grandparents and family, and that grief runs right through it. But this isn't a sad record so much as a cathartic one: accordions, violins, xylophones, pounding drums and gang vocals building song after song into something close to euphoria.

The four "Neighborhood" songs map out a snowed-in, half-imagined childhood world, "Une année sans lumière" drifts between English and French, "Haiti" pays tribute to Régine Chassagne's family roots, and "Wake Up" and "Rebellion (Lies)" turned into stadium-sized anthems almost overnight. Funeral put Montreal on the indie map and still sounds as urgent as it did in 2004.

Also at Kops: more Arcade Fire on vinyl · browse CDN Pop / Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Sony, a reissue of the 2004 album.