The Arcade Fire's Funeral is one of those sonically dense indie albums that steals tricks from so many pervious artists at once that reviews of it have tended to phrase their adulation in oenophilic terms ("a fruity splash of Pink Floyd; a flutter of Ian Curtis") that say more about the reviewer's ability to parse influences than the album's objective goodness/badness. Which isn't to say reviewers haven't bitten this hook. The Onion waffled, but AMG gave it four and a half stars, and Pitchfork named it #1 album of 2004. It's also gotten a big thumbs-up from my little brother, who has the best musical taste of anyone I know. Still, I'm skeptical.

This album is really, really good, but I balk at the fulsome praise it's been getting from so many corners at once. Funeral was made while half the band was losing family members, and the songs tend to have mournful melodies buried under mountains of strings. Yet there's also a flippancy that undermines the album's emotional core. Consider this sentence from the liner notes:

When family members kept dying, [the Arcade Fire] realized that they should call their record, "Funeral", noting the irony of their first full length recording bearing a name with such closure.

With that, the band considers the Eggersian paradox of profiting from grief without lifting a finger to escape from it, and at times even embracing it with what seems to be deliberate tactlessness. The album art looks like some kind of Gothic wallpaper, and the liner notes are designed as a funeral program mockup. A song about suicide is subtitled Laika, presumably after the dog the Soviets sent to a slow death in orbit. Another song, "Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)," is rendered as a country tune, sung in a Texas accent, and includes the lyric "Time keeps creepin' through the neighborhood, killing old folks, wakin' up babies." The song "Crown of Love" splices a 6/8 time signature to a dance-beat coda, but it's not clear whether the song is supposed to be toungue-in-cheek or not.

For all that the album is a fun listen, only the final track, "In the Backseat," has the haunting quality necessary for a mournful song to stick in the mind for days after a single listen. To the band's credit, they know how to end an album well, and the sorrow of "In the Backseat" is beautifully expressed. So what was going on with the previous tracks, where the hearts on the sleeves seemed to be made out of felt and held with a pin?

My suspicion is that this otherwise excellent album wasn't recorded with the singularity of purpose it aspires to. I recommend to it for the music, which is good. But its emotivism is more like the superf