The beautiful bittersweetness of Arcade Fire

Funeral

Arcade Fire

You know when you listen to something for the first time and can actively feel yourself becoming obsessed with it? Fall of 2023, I was sitting at my junior studio desk at school and listened through Funeral for the first time. I knew “Crown of Love” because someone had recommended it to me a few years before, but I hadn’t gotten into Arcade Fire at all yet. It took time. But after I finally listened through the entire album, I specifically remember posting a screenshot of the album on my story on Instagram with a caption that read, “this album just changed my life”. So, yeah. I was pretty serious about it. Later that same day, I listened to The Suburbs through for the first time as well, and that just further solidified my stance that Arcade Fire was something that I was going to be really, seriously into.  

First of all, the name Arcade Fire is probably the coolest, best band name that anyone has ever come up with. I don’t have a band, but if I did, I’d be mad that I didn’t come up with that myself. I think I’m just generally really into arcades to begin with, but something about only two words bringing up so much imagery in my mind is really spectacular. And the band name brings up so much lightness and darkness in my mind at the same time, which perfectly encapsulates the sound of their music. I watched a video essay about Funeral after listening through it which also influenced how I perceived it after my first listen. I generally pay much more attention to the instrumental elements of songs than the lyrics, so sometimes I need a little help with really “understanding” it. The video essay shed some light on how bizarre it is that the band would name their debut album Funeral. It’s only the beginning for them, yet their entire first album is themed around death. It explained that many of the band’s members had experienced the deaths of close family members around the same time, so it felt fitting to, in a sense, dedicate an album after these emotions, or to their family members. I remember telling this to my roommate Allison in a car ride home from campus one day, and she said it gave her chills just from hearing me explain it. 

Now to get a little more into the actual music of Funeral, the instrumentals are some of my favorites I’ve ever heard. The first track, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”, has this twinkly piano sound at the beginning, setting a perfectly magical yet bittersweet tone for the record. Representing bittersweetness in both visual arts and music can be such a hard thing to do. It’s a complex emotion. Happy-sad. Then the second track, “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)” - oh, don’t even get me started on Laika - sounds SO wonderful. Accordion instantly elevates a song to such a specific, indescribable type of emotion for me. Is it just french sounding? It’s just so out of the ordinary to hear a band use accordion the way they do. And then my favorite track, “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”, which is actually the fourth track, comes in so strongly that I still can never quite anticipate the opening. It’s loud and more intense than the other tracks. I love it. 

So basically, Funeral is one of the best albums ever and I was only a year old when it came out. The visuals for it are beautiful too. But then there’s also The Suburbs, which is a close second for me. The Suburbs very much holds the same emotion that Funeral does; they both have this overarching theme of growing up, and change, and thinking back to old memories or simpler times. Which is, like, the entire theme of my senior thesis. The title track, “The Suburbs” sets the tone. This song is probably the hardest hitting Arcade Fire song for me, and the best part is there’s a reprise of it, “The Suburbs (continued)” at the end of the album. And the reprise makes me even sadder. I’ve used both tracks in videos I made during both junior and senior year. I’ll link them here and here. Off The Suburbs, I also love “Ready to Start” (which “The Suburbs” fades into beautifully), “Suburban War”, and “We Used to Wait”. 

Off topic for a second, but it’ll relate back, I promise. I learned about a minimalist painter recently who has officially become the only minimalist painter whose practice I can fully, 100% enjoy and get behind; Agnes Martin. I can talk about her another time maybe, but she bases her paintings around emotion, and representing the sensation as colors. She said in a video I watched that music can often evoke emotion much stronger than the visual arts, so her goal with making abstract minimalist paintings was to try to do the same thing. My point is, Arcade Fire knows how to evoke emotion more than most other musicians I’ve listened to. I think it’s the wide range of instruments and voices. And their overall choices around what instruments they’re utilizing, and how they’re making them sound. I know close to nothing about the technicalities of music, so my explanation will never be all that great.  

Between Funeral and The Suburbs, there’s Neon Bible. Not my favorite, but I love “The Well and the Lighthouse” and “No Cars Go”. After The Suburbs came Reflektor. This one took a while for me to really get into. I liked the title track best at first, and then I got really into “Flashbulb Eyes”, the third track. And then one day at work last season when I was losing steam and really needed something new to listen to, I re-listened through the whole album (I had tried it a couple months prior and it didn’t stick) and then I LOVED it. Allison is a firm believer that things find you when you’re supposed to. Sometimes you won’t like the album because it’s not time yet, and then when it’s time it’s the best thing since sliced bread. There was a video essay that I watched about Reflektor at some point that I can’t find now. But it got into the Greek mythology theme, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and all that. The album is split into two sections, and I prefer the first half. And the music video for “Reflektor” is crazy. 

After this, I’m far less educated in the world of Arcade Fire. I listened through Everything Now about a month ago, and I liked it, but not as much as the stuff that came prior. My favorite songs from that are “Electric Blue” and “Put Your Money on Me”. Maybe I’ll listen through again soon to reassess. Then, their most recent album is WE, which I didn’t like at all. But that’s okay. 

So, why do I love Arcade Fire? Two reasons. First, they can represent bittersweetness in music better than probably the majority of bands or musicians. Second, they have super beautiful and unique instrumentation that makes them stand out from other stuff I’ve listened to. Between this unique instrumentation and thoughtful lyricism, they evoke a sense of bittersweetness when taking listeners through “neighborhoods” or “suburbs” that we can picture in our minds. Bonus reason that applies specifically to Funeral, the visuals. The cutout letters, the wood grain texture, the illustration style. It’s an aesthetic from the early 2000s that I love so dearly. And so symbolic to title a debut album that way.

I am so happy that I listened to Funeral that random day in fall of 2023, and that that album and The Suburbs essentially became the soundtrack to my senior thesis. It related so heavily to themes I was exploring in my own artwork: representing nostalgia, bittersweetness, and the abstractness of deteriorating childhood memories in a physical form. When thinking about my childhood home, the lyrics in “The Suburbs” related so heavily to the recurring dreams I’ve had about that place'; the lyric “in my dreams, we’re still screaming” repeating throughout the end of that song represent the feeling so perfectly for me. Albums really can find you at just the right time.

Moral of the story, they rock. There’s truly something for everyone. The older stuff is far more indie rock, and then Reflektor is way dancier. They can pull off a range of sounds which most people cannot do. I definitely prefer the early stuff, especially Funeral for the album cover and visuals. It’s just so pretty. It’s probably pretty unlikely that you’ve never, ever heard of them, so my recommendation is that you should most definitely dive in deeper if you haven’t. Listen through Funeral at least.  

Love, Maddie