NeighborPolled: Arcade Fire - FUNERAL poll

the climax of "crown of love" recently popped into my head and it was v nice

when my gf and i were living in a lil 2 1/2 apt with a bedroom/living room separated by a bookshelf, a friend slept over on our couch, and my gf had 'Haiti' as her alarm, and we had this really bad habit of snoozing for hours. my friend later told me he was just lying awake on our couch for over 2 hours as the first 15 seconds of the song would play over and over, every ten minutes

but yeah, this album is just lightning in a bottle

I know for a fact I had an early copy of this album but pretty sure I didn't listen to it, seeing as it landed on my desk during an anti-indie rock phase. Something brought me back to it soon enough, but a key imo was watching this 2005 Jools Holland clip, which I downloaded (took forever) maybe just after the advent of youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J96HC8RtZPs

Why did I download it? No idea. I don't think I was reading Pitchfork, but must have known of the brouhaha.

I'm glad this album is old enough now that it can be appreciated on its own and not seen as an emblem of some divisive slew of cultural signifiers once labeled "indie."

This album is great and I have nothing but the deepest hatred for everyone who thought they were too cool for it.

:(

It’s a new(ish) year and I have a new attitude.

their best album, which is to say it's not terrible. the followup is also not terrible.

I dont have much to say about their other albums. But Rebellion (Lies) is magnificent.

They never quite felt as intimate as on this record and it's a huge part of why I don't care about them as much anymore. Backseat is the one song that contains everything I love about Arcade Fire as an idea and I wish they could revisit that.

I've got no time for this band either except Rebellion, Crown of Love, Une Annee Sans Lumiere and The Sprawl II. All those songs are great

yeah still a good album. don' tknow why they got so uninteresting to me after this.

“Afterlife” from their second to last album is a pretty amazing song too. But their first album is still far and away their best.

i saw them on tour for this in a smallish club (compared to the fucking arenas they apparently play now) and it was great, good enough that I never wanted to see them again

For me the grandiose ambition of their records was appealing and compelling when they were nobodies, but felt bombastic and entitled when they were huge.

extremely difficult to overstate just how good and overwhelming this album is

Haïti is my favourite song on this album, and The Suburbs is a better album imho

I still quite enjoy Funeral, as I learned this morning after my first play since, well, the Obama years. Neon Bible too. Dat's dat, though.

my first play since, well, the Obama years

That kind of defined the band for me in retrospect. Even though those first two albums pre-dated Obama's presidency, they were released after Obama was already catapulted into political stardom thanks to his convention speech, and in a way both of them kind of rose to greater prominence for embodying some kind of utopian optimism. I wasn't fully onboard with either, but I was rooting for them to grow beyond my expectations, and with Arcade Fire, they briefly won me over only to fade and eventually collapse altogether in shameful fashion.

Anyway, posting here because in recent weeks, people I know who are much more attached to Broadway musicals have been raving about Stereophonic. (I was completely unaware of its original off-Broadway run.) I just saw Paul Schrader and film critic David Edelstein rave about it as well. I looked it up and was surprised to see that Will Butler had composed the music. I really had the blinders on, but it looks like this has launched a whole new thing for him outside of Arcade Fire. It's strange how the two musicals that have made the most waves on my social media feed in the past two months have been associated with two artists that benefitted greatly from being Pitchfork darlings in the mid-'00s. (The other is the new musical based on Sufjan Stevens's Illinois, which is supposed to be great.)