Six Degrees of "Funeral"

The Arcade Fire are overwhelming. They are earnest and ambitious and joyous and occasionally bombastic, yes, but mostly they are overwhelming. Indeed, sometimes it seems like the single aim of any Arcade Fire song is to overwhelm the reasoning mind, to summon a tidal wave of sound so massive it crashes your internal defenses. It's a noble goal, and one that places them in a select group of messianic rock bands equally beloved and ridiculed for their cornball optimism and plaintive earnestness, a pantheon that includes such big fat targets such as U2, Pearl Jam and “Soft Bulletin”-era Flaming Lips. The thing is, there's a fine line separating the soaring, unifying statement from the crass overstatement, and on Funeral, their indelible debut, the Arcade Fire proved they could high-step through this minefield as nimbly as anyone since Ten-era Pearl Jam or mullet-era Bono.

The thing that the offensively bad chest-thumpers ('sup, Chris Martin) never seem to realize is that it still takes a surgical ear and a miniaturist's attention to detail to build something this monumental, and, examined free from the wind pushing their sails, the songs on Funeral are marvels of construction. "Neighborhood #1," the album's first track, opens with a musical sunrise as evocative as Grieg's: a softly glowing piano pulses warmly on F major; pianos twinkle around it like sunlight glinting off dew, and then, that rising, slightly syncopated six-note melody surfaces, like the first rays breaking over the horizon. The song is a ball of steadily gathering momentum from there, seeming to take joy in its own accretion of speed until, at the end, it explodes into a sprint, the six-note melody now a hollered "HOOO-OOOO-OOOOH!" The flood of endorphins that results is twice as gratifying because the lead-up is so masterful; it ensures that every time you crest that hill, it is as exhilarating as that very first time.

This is probably why Arcade Fire can play shows in churches, and why "Wake Up" booms out of the Madison Square Garden sound system at Rangers games. Win Butler and co. aim high, but their lofty sentiments and moments of grandeur are not cheaply earned. Below, we've compared them to some fellow star-gazers who actually managed to come up with something to match their similarly widescreen dreams.

Pop songs don't get bigger than "Born to Run." They just don't. There's a reason that Bruce's fans have turned his name into a barbaric yawp — Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuce! — that echoes across the hilltops. It's mostly because he wrote "Born to Run," which is kind of like the Ronnettes' "Be My Baby" if Ronnie Spector were Brunnhilde from Wagner's Die Valkure, bearing Bruce and his girl Wendy to Valhalla on the back of a winged horse — or a "suicide machine" motorcycle. The lyrics to "Born to Run" are maybe the most self-consciously epic rock and roll lyrics ever penned, skirting absurdity and at times falling outright into it — "Just wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims and strap your hands cross my engines" never fails to provoke a giggle. But Bruce understood, like Win and Regine understand, that epics aren't born without risking absurdity, and when, as is the case with "Born to Run," you end up writing one of the most resonant, beloved rock songs in history, the risk pays off tenfold.

The rest of the record is pitched at the same fervid tenor; dreams, visions, magic in the night, backs against the wall, cities busting open, and all of it is matched by an absolute cascade of sound: chimes, pianos, blurting saxophones, organs, echo-laden guitars. Funeral is a direct update of this template, minus the American Graffiti props. Tears are collected for years in a cup, parents forget their children's names, snow buries entire neighborhoods, family trees lose their leaves, and among all the wreckage, two young lovers meet in the middle of the town and swing from the power lines with joyful abandon.

Of all the artists on this list, Journey are subject to the most mockery, which is, on balance, probably fair; their uplift is by far the most unabashedly cheesy. The broad strokes Steve Perry paints in on "Don't Stop Believin" makes Born to Run look like a Mountain Goats album. But man, if you actually manage to stop believin' while that Chariots of Fire keyboard progression is circling round and round — well, social scientists could probably use you as a control in psychological susceptibility tests. Ham-fisted grandeur is grandeur nonetheless, and "Don't Stop Believin'" gets its job done and then some. Escape, released in 1981, is one of the pinnacles of the AOR rock era, and, appropriately, every song feels, well, inescapable: even the songs you've technically never heard before feel like familiar classics.

Funeral is, admittedly, a less shameless affair than Escape, but not by all that much: the relentlessness of the 1-6-4-5 chord progression on "Wake Up," and its massive, wordless unison "WHOA-OHHHH" chorus, would fit pretty well on a jukebox right after "Believin." Journey sold six billion records for a reason, and that reason wasn't (just) that the LP market was hopelessly oversaturated in 1981. It's because Steve Perry understands the opera inside you, even if you don’t. Go ahead: get drunk on a weeknight and listen to "Open Arms." See what happens. It won't be pretty.

"WHEN THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO BURN, YOU MUST SET YOURSELF ON FIRE." So intones a fervent voice at the outset of the Montreal indie-pop band's 2005 album Set Yourself On Fire,, followed by a blooming of strings, horns, keyboards and guitar. The song title? "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead." Right there, the tone is pretty much set — this is teen-movie-climax music, guy-running-through-the-rain-to-find-his-beloved music. "I'm not sorry I met you/ I'm not sorry it's over/ I'm not sorry there's nothing to say," the female and male leads sing in harmony together, a climactic moment followed by an even bigger climax of weeping strings. Set Yourself On Fire isn't a mindless collection of big moments, though; it's a formally ambitious song cycle, full of left-turn extended codas (see the long, comet-trails outro to the title track), propulsive synth-rock pockmarked by glitches ("He Lied About Death"), and the English-madrigal melody of "Celebration Guns." Like Arcade Fire, Stars are serious about their catharsis, and Set Yourself On Fire is, like Funeral, a document of romantics who understand the hard work that accompanies real transcendence.

"A symphony must be like the world; it must contain everything." This is one of Gustav Mahler's most famous quotes, and if you don't hear an echo of Arcade Fire's world-saving ambition in here...well, go back and re-listen to "Crown of Love" again and get back to us. Mahler spent his whole life trying to meet his own punishingly impossible requirement, to make music BIG enough to satisfy his own burning needs. Upon visiting Niagara Falls for the first time, he was said to have remarked, "At last — fortissimo!" Appropriately enough, his symphonies are at once elemental – so vast that they seem to contain the very wildness and majesty of untamed nature – and wildly personal, internal agony writ upon a larger stage than anyone before had thought, or even dared, to attempt. They bear appropriately epic names: No. 1 is "The Titan," No. 8 is "The Symphony of a Thousand." This one? It's called "The Resurrection," and it grapples with despair, mortality, and the possibility of joy in the face of those two forces with the same enormously beating heart that powers Funeral.

First, there's that gruff quaver of voice. Will Sheff's vocals can bear an uncanny resemblance to Win Butler's, whose in turn are a direct echo of the Boss's. It's the husky sound of an otherwise-stoic guy's barriers breaking down, a so-called man's-man finally and completely losing his shit. It's a potent sound, and Will Sheff weds it to the yelp of the adenoidal art-school kid to create a new kind of observer, one who takes turns being empathetic and contemptuous in alternate breaths. The sonic template, too, is straight out of the Bruce/Win Butler playbook; "Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe" sports the "boom, boom-boom, POW" drum beat, the bar-band piano chords, and the reverb-drenched voice. Sheff, of course, being the self-contradicting unreliable narrator he is, uses the anthemic chorus to undercut all of this: "It's just a life story, so there's no climax/No more new territory, so pull away the IMAX." On The Stage Names, the tension between Sheff's jaundiced worldview and the aching generosity of the music creates all kinds of goosebumpy moments, the same kind of unknowable tremor that runs through us when Regine Butler, at the end of "In The Backseat," throws her head back and yodels to the sky about we-know-not-what.