[three out of five maple leaves]

With a first album title like Funeral, instead of opting for the more or less obligatory self-titled debut nomenclature, one would expect this album to be a horribly depressing piece of emo crap culled from the fungus growing off the snot-and-tear torn tissues littering the floor of Conor Oberst’s basement recording studio. But no, The Arcade Fire, hailing from Canada (eh?) manages to triumph over adversity…or at least their album’s crappy title. Intricate string arrangements, Belle-and-Sebastian-esque wuss-pop, rock ‘n’ roll, and, yeah, a little bit of good olde indie rock, combine to form a collection of music whose desperation, urgency, and energy meld expertly with whimsy and playfulness, leaving plenty of room around the edges for the insertion of wedged slices of melancholia. With 10 songs clocking in at about the average length of a Beatles album, Funeral definitely delivers the goods, but is somewhat sparse in its use of band member Régine Chassagne’s vocal talents; her mellow French Canadian crooning doesn’t even enter the foreground until the eighth track, takes a break, and then reappears on the tenth, the album’s somewhat disappointing closer “In The Backseat.” Not that this is a bad album; it’s definitely good, but not as good as the hype preceding it. The critics lapped this one up like a man who’d been wandering the Sahara for several days and then stumbles across a Capri Sun juice pouch; sure Funeral is refreshing, in the context of the musical wasteland that was The Year of Our Lord 2004, but it is by no means the shimmering oasis that some critics made it out to be.