Arcade Fire

The Arcade Fire is an indie rock band from Canada. The first of their songs I heard was Neighborhood 3 (Power Out). It's a really good song, you should check it out. When Jake gave me the album Neon Bible, I had pretty high expectations. Neon Bible didn't quite live up to those expectations, but I still liked some of the songs. After that, I "gave up" on Arcade Fire in a way. I mean, I still liked them, and I still loved the song Neighborhood 3, but I never really got into them. A little while later, Jake gave me the album Funeral. It's ten times better than Neon Bible, in my opinion. It's the album Neighborhood 3 is on [still one of my favorite Arcade Fire songs]. Worth listening too.

The album is very emotional. Partially because many members of the band had deaths in their family during the writing/recording. The emotion is genuine. Maybe that's what makes the album so great.

Here are some of the reviews of Funeral:

Metacritic.com gave it a 90/100, while their users gave the album a 9.4/10.

Tiny Mix Tapes: 100/100 "One of the best albums of the year, hands down."

Drowned In Sound: 100/100 "Encompassing chamber pop melodies, angular art-rock, lavish orchestration and post-punk vocals, its sheer sonic size and ambition goes some way towards justifying the amount of gushing praise that's been heaped upon this album since its September release on Merge last year. The fact that the music is so paradoxically life-affirming and euphoric makes it much easier to write, what now feel like, trite hyperboles."

The Guardian: 100/100 "One of the year's best already, by a mile."

Dot Music: 100/100 "“Funeral” is the sort of perfectly-realised record you’d hope from a band at the top of their game. For a debut release it’s unmatched in recent years. Hearing it is to wake from a black and white slumber and to view the world in widescreen Technicolour. "

No Ripcord: 90/100 "Not only are the songs uniformly excellent, they also show a mastery of the art of controlled dynamics, of tension and release, that most young bands ignore to pursue the catharsis of sustained intensity. "

Village Voice: 90/100 "Funeral is a remarkable record, hard to hear at first, then hard to stop hearing."

cokemachineglow: 90/100 "Funeral... is a resounding success on all levels---the group clearly able to make something incredible out of the familiar, and something inexplicably moving out of one emotionally draining year. "

The New York Times: 80/100 "One of the year's best indie-rock albums."

The Onion (A.V. Club): 70/100 "Funeral's layering of sound and wide-eyed posing can be overly dense, and though the band utilizes nice melodies and lively arrangements, the nostalgia-steeped-indie-rock-orchestra pool was pretty much drained before The Arcade Fire dove in. "

The entire album consists of beautifully written lyrics. The song In The Backseat is the only song on the album that is sung entirely by their female vocalist, and the lyrics are as beautifully written as all of the others.

I like the peace

in the backseat,

I don't have to drive,

I don't have to speak,

I can watch the country side,

and I can fall asleep.

My family tree's

losing all its leaves,

crashing towards the driver's seat,

the lightning bolt made enough heat

to melt the street beneath your feet.

Alice died

in the night,

I've been learning to drive.

My whole life,

I've been learning.

I like the peace

in the backseat,

I don't have to drive,

I don't have to speak,

I can watch the country side

Alice died

in the night,
I've been learning to drive.
My whole life,
I've been learn----Oh....