by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Established fans may claim that the emotive urgency and surging beauty of an Arcade Fire show can never be caged in plastic. Their 2002 EP/demo didn't do it, serving only as a document of the band's first steps. But their new album Funeral, out now on Merge Records, that captures that colossal spirit and symphonic grandeur, set to flow forth at their official hometown CD launch at the Salvation Army church next weekend.

Each inspired strain of the elegiac opus Funeral cements the Arcade Fire's status as one of this city's best bands. The album's inception can be traced back to 1999, when Houston, Texas-born singer Win Butler moved to Montreal to study scriptural interpretation at McGill. Before long, fate delivered him to a vernissage where Régine Chassagne was singing. Born in Haiti and raised in St-Lambert, Chassagne displayed multidextrous talents, from jazz to medieval music, and soon teamed up with Butler to build a band.

The Arcade Fire's first incarnation featured local scenesters Brendan Reed (les Angles Morts) and Dane Mills, while its current line-up includes guitarist/keyboardist Richard Parry (Bell Orchestre) and Guelph-born bassist Tim Kingsbury. Sarah Neufeld (also of Bell Orchestre) joins the band live, boldly covering for Funeral's slew of strings with a lone violin, and part-time multi-instrumentalist Will Butler (Win's brother) will join full-time next summer after wrapping his studies in Chicago.

The size of the band, and the size of their sound, suggests no shortage of influences. Within the locomotive vitality of "Power Out," the choral sway of "Wake Up" and the hope-filled heartbreak of Chassagne's "Haiti," hints of Debussy, Neil Young, New Order, the Pixies and Motown are evident but never obvious. With as many nuanced hues, harsh glints, smooth sides and sharp edges as a diamond, it's no wonder Funeral was written during a volatile year, when four band members lost loved ones, two quit and two others (Win and Régine) got married. The Mirror caught the band in a drama-free mood to discuss church, channelling and neighbourly ways.

Mirror: It must be strange reading really intense reviews and reports from your shows. Do you feel pressured to deliver a spiritual awakening each time you play?

Richard Parry: "Hey, I hear it's a religious experience - it's gonna be awesome!" (everyone laughs) But there's definitely an all-or-nothing quality, or an energy, that we get when we play which, in a non-denominational sense, can definitely manifest as something spiritual.

Win Butler: We're just bashing around trying to do something meaningful, but not in a preachy sense. I remember talking about doing a chunk of dates with the Liars in the States and Dan from Wolf Parade said, "It'd be a good fit because you guys are both channelling something, except they're channelling something evil and you guys are channelling something good." But the emphasis is on the songs and trying to perform them well, and the nature of what that means is gonna change a lot. What we're doing isn't a gimmick. It bugs me when people liken the show to Broadway.

RP: Well, it's more theatrical than a normal rock show because we treat the stage as a stage.

Régine Chassagne: But we're not acting. It's not a circus. Sometimes people are shocked when we're not wearing the Viking helmets.

M: Or the military uniforms?

Tim Kingsbury: We had one kid come to a show wearing the uniform.

WB: Philadelphia. He dressed up to match the picture on the Merge Web site. It was funny. But then he tried to kiss Sarah.

TK: And he was like, 14.

Everyone: Ewww.

Going to the chapel

M: So you're launching your album at a church?

WB: Yeah! We wanted to play in a different space, and my friend Anita, who used to play harp with us, told me that when she was younger she saw Petra play at a church - they're this shitty Christian rock band. So that got me thinking about finding a local church we could play.

M: I'm not familiar with that church.

WB: It looks like a bank from the outside. It's a really beautiful Romanesque building with big pillars out front, but inside it's a church with stained glass and everything.

M: I understand some of you have previous experience performing in church?

TK: When I was a kid I used to sing duets and trios with my brothers and sisters, and the occasional solo. They were pretty awful songs, written in the mid-'80s. There was one song with a computer theme, about serving God. And I still sing like an eight-year-old boy.

WB: When you first auditioned, I remember you had that eight-year-old-boy sound we were looking for.

RP: Wanted: bassist and/or castrati. (laughs all around)

M: Régine, I heard a nun forced you to play organ?

RC: Yeah, and the sister was really intense, like she was going to have a heart attack any minute. I wanted to sing so bad - I love singing! - but she made me replace the organ player, and I was only 10 or 12.

WB: We also sang with my little brother at my grandfather Alvino's funeral in San Francisco. He had been involved in the music industry, so his old-time industry friends, who'd been out of the business for 20 years, were all talking up Régine afterwards, like, "You're a star, you've got it, whatever it is, you've got it!" At a damn funeral! It was so funny.

Pall in the family

M: Tell me about the series of "Neighborhood" songs.

WB: I realized there were a bunch of songs with the word "neighborhood," so I included it in the titles to acknowledge the lyrical thread. But it's not necessarily about a physical neighbourhood. I mean, I don't even know my neighbours. It's about the group of eight or 10 people who would be really affected if you were an asshole for a week, or if you didn't show up to work tomorrow and never showed up again. I get the sense that small interpersonal relationships have a lot of bearing on the way the world works. If we're not capable of treating people we've known our whole lives with respect, we're in a lot of trouble.

M: I assume that theme became more central after the deaths in your families?

WB: Yeah, but it's not entirely autobiographical and it seems more thought out than it is. You know, we needed a title for the record, we just got back from a funeral, Funeral it is. Of course, it seemed fitting because people kept dying. Death almost has less to do with the person who died than everyone else because it forces you to think about really important things. This was the state we were in when we were writing some of these songs, and when we read the lyrics afterwards, it made a lot of sense.

RC: Before we put all the lyrics together, it was like -

WB: - what the hell are we gonna do with all these really different songs? There's a lot of breadth in the sound, and to our ears, it seemed a bit silly sometimes.

RP: Mix-tape-esque. It's definitely more stylistically varied than your average math rock album. (big laughs)

WB: It's like the Beatles. We've got the dopey Paul songs, the acid songs, the party songs, the nonsense songs, the kids' songs.

M: Well, this band is essentially only a year old.

TK: I don't think we've hit our stride in terms of working together. We experimented a lot during the recording, but we're not completely comfortable with one way of doing things.

WB: We're about to play a shitload, so we'll figure it out as we go. We're either going to fucking kill each other or end up a much better band. Or a mixture of both.

RP: How many will come back? Tune in next year for another exciting episode.

CD launch with guests at the Salvation Army Montreal Citadel (2085 Drummond) on Saturday, Sept. 25, 8 p.m., $10

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