Piece de resistance

No matter what Arcade Fire have since become, no matter the extent of Win Butler's misdemeanours - for me, nothing can ever detract from Funeral, or at least from the memory of first discovering it. It's one of those albums that instantly demanded absolute devotion but rewarded it handsomely, and remains a record whose songs still routinely get the hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

It seems that Stereogum's Ian Cohen, assessing the album two decades after its release, broadly agrees. In an astute appraisal of a record that expresses "capital-e Emotions with such intensity that it blots out everything in existence", he offers context and reflection on how it changed the landscape, but also doesn't shy away from acknowledging the criticisms of those who found it "bombastic, indulgent, cringe", the work of over-earnest, pious "tryhards".

Unlike Cohen, I never really saw Funeral in relation to US indie rock acts. For me, Arcade Fire's origins in Montreal invited comparisons with other recent products of the city - most notably, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The two collectives' commitment to rock convention clearly differed significantly, but they seemed to share a sense of urgency and an attitude of politically charged defiance. These were secular hymns to stimulate the head and stir the heart.

Cohen ventures that "Arcade Fire's visions of love and danger and rebellion stood out for their childlike whimsy". For me, they didn't at the time - but perhaps they do now, with hindsight look somewhat whimsical, even naive, just as Godspeed's simultaneously apocalyptic and desperately hopeful narratives no longer seem to hold quite the same power.

But then again maybe this says more about my own (growing?) cynicism, twenty years on. As Cohen observes, a large part of what went wrong for Arcade Fire (after another two very fine albums in Neon Bible and The Suburbs) was their subsequent abandonment of sincerity and retreat into cynicism. To those for whom Funeral "truly felt like a matter of life and death", myself included, this inevitably seemed to be a cruel betrayal.