Funeral
I've been gone so long, I'm not sure if I actually have any readers left. Hmm. Well, this should be therapeutic, if nothing else.
I just discovered "Funeral" by The Arcade Fire. Well, perhaps "discovered" isn't the right word, as I'd heard just about all of it from the day it came out in mid-2004. But this recording, by this tightrope-walking, emotionally harrowing indie act from Montreal, recently took on a LOT more resonance in my life. When I'm away from the office, and therefore not listening to CDs that publicists have extracted promises from me to check out, it's on quite a bit.
I think it was these lines, in the first track, "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)," that just destroyed me:
"And then / we tried to name our babies / but we forgot the names that / the names we used to know"
In the last post I mentioned that we were expecting child #2 in November. Well... now we aren't anymore, and this is an event that comes with very few reliable roadmaps. Is it, technically, a "death in the family?" Well, probably not -- if it really were, there would be the usual trappings of such things: a memorial service, a burial, a marker, then decades of flowers to come.
And yet... and yet, it's certainly much more than getting your tonsils taken out. We saw a speck (which our Moppet once was), saw a tiny heartbeat and got a thermal printout of it to last joyous years to come.
"Funeral" is not a happenstance, hipster-ironic title for The Arcade Fire. The CD was recorded amidst several deaths in the band members' families, as well as the marriage of the two principals, Win Butler and Regine Chassagne. (Such a bittersweet event I know well; our own wedding came about a month before the passing of my mother-in-law.)
So in the absence of a real funeral (which I would have, in some way, really appreciated), so far The Arcade Fire is doing the job. As allmusic.com's James Christopher Monger says: "These are songs that pump blood back into the heart as fast and furiously as it's draining from the sleeve on which it beats."
I just discovered "Funeral" by The Arcade Fire. Well, perhaps "discovered" isn't the right word, as I'd heard just about all of it from the day it came out in mid-2004. But this recording, by this tightrope-walking, emotionally harrowing indie act from Montreal, recently took on a LOT more resonance in my life. When I'm away from the office, and therefore not listening to CDs that publicists have extracted promises from me to check out, it's on quite a bit.
I think it was these lines, in the first track, "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)," that just destroyed me:
"And then / we tried to name our babies / but we forgot the names that / the names we used to know"
In the last post I mentioned that we were expecting child #2 in November. Well... now we aren't anymore, and this is an event that comes with very few reliable roadmaps. Is it, technically, a "death in the family?" Well, probably not -- if it really were, there would be the usual trappings of such things: a memorial service, a burial, a marker, then decades of flowers to come.
And yet... and yet, it's certainly much more than getting your tonsils taken out. We saw a speck (which our Moppet once was), saw a tiny heartbeat and got a thermal printout of it to last joyous years to come.
"Funeral" is not a happenstance, hipster-ironic title for The Arcade Fire. The CD was recorded amidst several deaths in the band members' families, as well as the marriage of the two principals, Win Butler and Regine Chassagne. (Such a bittersweet event I know well; our own wedding came about a month before the passing of my mother-in-law.)
So in the absence of a real funeral (which I would have, in some way, really appreciated), so far The Arcade Fire is doing the job. As allmusic.com's James Christopher Monger says: "These are songs that pump blood back into the heart as fast and furiously as it's draining from the sleeve on which it beats."
posted by Godric of Finchale | 10:05 PM
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