Top 25 Albums Of The Decade (#14)

14) ARCADE FIRE – Funeral (2004)

Now here we have an album that’s so well-known and critically hailed that I almost didn’t want to include it on this list. In fact, before I started working on this project, I probably hadn’t listened to it in its entirety in nearly four years. Sure, I played it religiously back in late 2004 after buying it at Schoolkids Records (R.I.P.) because I thought it had a cool cover. Little did my boneheaded sophomore-self know that it would turn out to be one of the most important rock albums of the 2000s—loved and lauded by both the geeks and cool kids alike, your sociology professor, the girl in your recitation who you’re too afraid to talk to, bankers, astronauts, stevedores and probably even your mom. And since I was so Heavy Metal Thunder at the time, I didn’t recommend it to any of my friends (because I didn’t want to seem like a pussy) and therefore six months later couldn’t say, “Hey man, I was listening to Arcade Fire back when they were nothing.” I knew it was over when CBS used “Wake Up” as an intro to an NFL playoff game. Society, in short, stole this album from me, and every ex-girlfriend who adored it just added another brick in the wall. By the time 2006 rolled around, my resentment was absolute. I buried this CD in my case where I kept all the other discs I didn’t care to listen to anytime soon—Blood Red Throne, Arch Enemy, Oasis—and didn’t retrieve it except to listen to “Power Out” every once in a while. I cut my hair, moved off campus and got into post-rock. I bought an acoustic guitar and learned Simon & Garfunkel songs. I read Gravity’s Rainbow and pretended to understand it. I started using words like “globalization” and “positivism,” and got really paranoid when I found out what the Patriot Act actually was. Then I got even more paranoid that I was becoming some kind of “indie kid,” and rescued myself with Sleep and early Cathedral. At least that’s how I saw it back then: that there were two camps (metal and non-) and you could only choose one, lest someone call you out for “faking” liking the other. Of course I know better by now—good music is good music no matter how many fedoras or bullet belts are involved—and I have finally decided to let Funeral back into my life. Because without its inclusion this list would be a joke. A fucking joke. So I guess I’ll just have to endure.