An album whose title makes all other album titles seem like shallow self-indulgence, Arcade Fire’s debut LP Funeral is forty-seven minutes of earned music. Born out of the Shakespearean life-extremes of love and death, the Montreal-based quintet has crafted a singular indie rock event in ten scenes. The liner notes, which unfold into a playbill, affirm the fleeting immediacy that pervades the album, lending it all the power of an archetypal tragedy. One almost feels guilty after listening too much, as if requiring the actors and stagehands to endlessly reassemble and relive their impassioned performances, performances brutally informed from band members’ personal experiences, at the touch of a greedy finger.

According to the notes, the band formed in the late summer of 2003 in Montreal, a birth soon after echoed by the marriage of two core members: multi-instrumentalists Win Butler and Regine Chassagne. By the end of the following winter, a devastating string of deaths (nine, apparently) had visited various band members’ families, and the material for an album with a raw and mourning soul had been recorded. A group in tune with the cycles of the human condition, they specifically state, “when family members kept dying they realized that they should call their record ‘Funeral’, noting the irony of their first full length recording bearing a name with such closure.” This is not insensitive cleverness, but sober acknowledgment of how creation can come out of destruction.

The lyrics are tastefully printed in the playbill as prose poems, and if they occasionally sound callous (like in “Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)”),

…Time keeps creepin’ through the neighborhood, killing old folks, wakin’ up babies just like we knew it would. All the neighbors are startin’ up a fire, burning all the old folks the witches and the liars. My eyes are covered by the hands of my unborn kids, but my heart keeps watchin’ through the skin of my eyelids.

it’s probably because the writers have endured so much abrasion. Elsewhere, as in the bitter anthem “Wake Up”, the expressions are pained and direct:

…Somethin’ filled up my heart with nothin’, someone told me not to cry. But now that I’m older, my heart’s colder, and I can see that it’s a lie. Children wake up, hold your mistake up, before they turn the summer into dust…

Butler’s delivery, simultaneously exultant and miserable, captures the clarity of these lyrics, as if gained after months of introspective grief. The coincidental metaphors are staggering: the joy of a late summer of musical collaboration, of human collaboration and love, followed hard upon by a winter of sudden loss. Musically, as if unsure where to turn, the song carries on in a slow march of lush strings and howls for nearly four minutes before switching in its last thirty seconds into a bouncy tempo flavored by accordion, xylophone, and, at its passionate coda, a distinct and rootsy Rickenbacker/telecaster riff, all as Butler screams “With my lightnin’ bolts a glowin’ I can see where I am goin’ to be when the reaper he reaches and touches my hand. Better look out below!” Whether this is anger, resentment, or a new bitter confidence is unclear, as unclear as the numb that accompanies mourning.

With their eclectic palate, Arcade Fire often begins to resemble many other championed acts, just before they launch into their own distinctive textures. Their lush percussion arrangements and sometimes barked lyrics, in the bratty “Neighborhood #2 (Laika)” for example, remind the listener of the best of Modest Mouse, but more like a hybrid of The Moon and Antarctica and Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones, particularly “Dark Center of the Universe” cut with the latter’s title track. “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”, however, could have snuck into the Trainspotting soundtrack without seeming out of place. One could argue that Funeral is much of what Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness could have been had it not been soulless and bloated; Funeral’s layout design, Victorian-esque calligraphy and wallpaper, is comparable to something Corgan would approve. The slight classical flavoring of “Crown of Love” reminds of the soaring and swelling of Sigur Ros, and only slightly less ethereal. When Butler sings “Hey, my eyes are shooting sparks, la nuit mes yeux t’eclairent” you’d swear it’s Jeff Tweedy.

Or, maybe because The Arcade Fire draw sound from so many instruments (accordion, synths, xylophones, classic guitars, strings, recorders, piano, and a big crate full of percussion) and in careful proportions that they manage to reach so many familiar places. Each song is not merely a mélange (a la Elephant Six) but a delicate recipe and, however sweet, lasting only as long as it lasts. Paradoxically, the album itself may become one which is seemingly played forever.