3. 'Funeral' by Arcade Fire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zdNdjF-htY Imagine if you will a band of young punks who decide to throw out every rule of pop music and replace it with whatever they feel like doing, regardless of how lame someone else thinks it may be. Does that sound like something you may like to hear? If so, congratulations, I'd like to introduce you to Arcade Fire. This band has turned out to be the biggest breath of fresh air to come across the mainstream in over a decade. Their music has consistently been unique and refreshing, while also somehow being accessible to fans of almost any music genre. They have all the building blocks of great music (catchy rhythms, memorable lyrics, singable melodies), but refuse to stick to any one sound. Most of the members of the band are multi-instrumentalists, which enables them to feature a crazy variety of sounds in one song. Guitar, bass, drums, cello, violin, hurdy-gurdy, xylophone, piano, glockenspiel, French horn, accordion, mandolin, keyboards and synthesizers, you name it. And it all started with 2004's landmark Funeral. While not a concept album, it closely adheres to a theme of mortality, and explores it through various means, most prominently through the loss of childhood in several songs. The lyrics, while at first seemly meaningless, soon begin to make sense and connect the entire album into - not simply a collection of songs - but into one unified piece. It now stands in its rightful place as one of the greatest albums of the last decade, if not the best.
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