The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible (2007)
One of my former youth group students turned me onto this album and band and I’m so glad he did. This is one of those albums that just grows on you and gets better each time you listen to it. By my third time through I was completely hooked and still keep it on regular rotation. Neon Bible is Arcade Fire’s follow up to the 2004 LP Funeral, and boasts a richly textured sound with a wide range of instrumentation.
Another strong feature of the album is its thoughtful and often haunting lyrics. On Neon Bible the band wrestles with questions of faith, doubt, fear, longing and loss. In “Windowsill” the band rejects the fragmentation and rampant materialism of Western culture while simultaneously lamenting how much of it they have imbibed. “My Body is a Cage” closes the album with a painful longing for the redemption of body and soul from an age that calls darkness light, and where life is a hollow play on a stage of fear and self-doubt. From beginning to end this album is a profound piece of art.