TORONTO - As far as introductions go, it's tough to top the incandescent initiation received by Arcade Fire.
It was Sept. 12, 2004, when the influential, stubbornly snobby music webzine Pitchfork published a gushing review of "Funeral," the 10-song debut record from the Montreal band.
"It's taken perhaps too long for us to reach this point where an album is at last capable of completely and successfully restoring the tainted phrase 'emotional' to its true origin," read the review.
Just like that, word spread like, um, wildfire. The budding blogosphere was quick to hoist the indie-rockers onto its collective shoulders, and soon the band was rising to lofty heights.
But unlike many of the other similarly feted groups of the past 10 years, Arcade Fire wasn't discarded as quickly. In a decade where music was disposable, "Funeral" did the near-impossible: it refused to die.
Over the past few weeks, "Funeral" has been featured in the top 10 of end-of-decade album lists compiled by Rolling Stone, NME, Entertainment Weekly, the Guardian, Pitchfork, the Irish Times, the Independent and the Onion. Strains of the album's influence can be found in everything from past blogger favourites such as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to the orchestral-influenced arena-rock amplitude of Coldplay.
And Montreal, which deservedly drew as much attention as any rock town since Seattle in the wake of "Funeral," continues to rapidly output noteworthy bands.
Looking back on the past 10 years, it's clear that only a select list of artists -- Canadian or otherwise -- can compete with what Arcade Fire accomplished.
"Record of the decade? I'd have to go with that," Hey Rosetta frontman Tim Baker said of "Funeral" during a recent a telephone interview.
"They really just changed the face of pop music."
The manner in which they did it, too, remains something of a wonder.
After years of shifting lineups and juggling band members, Arcade Fire began making noise around Montreal in 2003 after self-releasing an EP. Initially, it was their raucous, almost confrontational live show that inspired word-of-mouth buzz (the Guardian later called them "celestial buskers.")
Texas-raised frontman Win Butler would wade through the crowd with his guitar, chanting lyrics directly in the faces of the audience. The rest of the band -- eventually composed of multi-talented Canadian musicians Regine Chassagne (who married Butler in 2003), Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kingsbury, Sarah Neufeld and Jeremy Gara, as well as Butler's brother, William -- would kick up a racket onstage, swapping instruments and never staying still for long.
In '04 the band recorded "Funeral" for less than $10,000 and, thanks in part to producer Howard Bilerman, got it released on influential American indie imprint Merge, the home of Superchunk, Spoon and the Magnetic Fields.
After the glowing notice in Pitchfork, raves poured in for "Funeral" in blogs and the mainstream press.
NME said it was "the most cathartic album of the year," the New York Times called it one of the year's best indie-rock albums and Rolling Stone said the record "aches with elegiac intensity."
What critics couldn't agree on, exactly, was where the music came from.
The Talking Heads were bandied about as a possible influence due to Butler's nervy energy, the band's post-punk backbone and cleverly oblique lyrics. There were comparisons to Modest Mouse, for Butler's unhinged vocals, and Merge labelmates Neutral Milk Hotel for the band's diverse instrumentation and antique esthetics. The grandiose operatics of U2 and vocal conviction of Bruce Springsteen were also occasional reference points.
But to many ears, Arcade Fire didn't sound much like anything that came before.
"I really thought it was something fresh," Besnard Lakes frontman Jace Lasek said.
"It was sort of unique and their own. That's pretty important."
Over a bed of driving, propulsive post-punk percussion and electric guitar, Arcade Fire poured on layers of instrumentation -- synth, piano, accordion, xylophone, recorders, organ, upright bass, violin, viola, horn, harp, cello, hurdy-gurdy and mandolin were a few of the tools at the disposal of their portable orchestra -- to create baroque pop songs with an uncommon urgency and raw emotionality.
The album, written around the time that members of the band lost a series of family members, was steeped in death and mourning yet sounded positively joyous at times, with the insistent danceability of the backbeat combining with Butler's sky-reaching vocals for a sound that was ever-uplifting and reliably huge.
It didn't take long for the groundswell of breathless blog buzz to reverberate.
Soon, Arcade Fire performed onstage with Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Coldplay's Chris Martin said they were one of the two best bands in the world. U2 handpicked the group as an opener and invited them onstage to perform Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart." Their fans included David Bowie and Beck.
The band also found support among their Canadian peers.
"That record ('Funeral') was, and still is, just a classic, fantastic album," Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew said.
"Funeral" went on to sell 750,000 copies around the world and earn two Grammy nominations. It was all pretty unprecedented for an indie band, particularly one from Canada.
"A Canadian band full of multinationals, making it big on an American indie label, was rather unusual," said Alan Cross, host of "ExploreMusic With Alan Cross" and "The Ongoing History of New Music."
"What made it even more unusual was that they stuck to their indie guns. ... They called the shots and they played by the rules that they set down and they would not be deterred by those rules. They would not play the major-label game, or the overall music industry game."
"They showed people that they could maintain complete control over their career and destiny and make a reasonably good living at it."
Indeed, watching Arcade Fire's success certainly had an effect on some of the other bands working in Montreal.
"They were probably the only band (people) had ever met that were playing shows of that calibre," Lasek said. "They were able to see how a band with that much success . . . operates."
Arcade Fire wasn't the first indie-rock band from Montreal to achieve international success in this decade -- outfits including Godspeed You Black Emperor and the Unicorns turned heads internationally, too.
But Arcade Fire hit much bigger, and afterwards music fans around the world began turning to Montreal, which would produce such bands as Wolf Parade (and its offshoots Sunset Rubdown and Handsome Furs), the Besnard Lakes, Patrick Watson and Chromeo.
"Every time we'd go somewhere . . . people would show up just because we were from Montreal," Malajube bassist Mathieu Cournoyer said in a telephone interview.
"I think they pretty much put Montreal on the map for a couple years."
Meanwhile, Arcade Fire's sound -- that lush, booming orchestral rock -- became popular, though difficult, to imitate.
"I still hear a lot of people trying to copy them," Lasek said. "When we're on the road and people hand us their CDs they just made in their basement, and we listen to it, and it's like: 'There's some Arcade Fire!' "
Of course, with the sparkling reviews lavished on "Funeral" and the band's excellent 2007 followup, "Neon Bible," came the inevitable backlash.
With expectations for the band reaching so high, some people wondered what the fuss was about.
"I think the problem is I saw them live first," Strokes singer Julian Casablancas told The Canadian Press in a recent interview.
"Live, they have these guys who do goofy stuff and run around and play drums on motorcycle helmets. I just didn't dig that vibe at all. . . . I didn't like it."
Cross, meanwhile, had an almost opposite reaction.
"('Funeral') was new and different and fresh, but I wasn't really sure what all the fuss was about," he recalled. "It's one of those albums that has to be listened to as a whole, or listened to live.
"I think they're an extraordinarily good live band. But they're one of those groups where some people will hear them, and hear what they have to offer, and other people just won't get it."
A rep for the band's label confirmed that they have been in the studio working on a new record, which will reportedly be released in 2010.
In the meantime, some listeners are still discovering "Funeral."
"I just recently realized that song in the trailer for `Where the Wild Things Are' is theirs," Casablancas said of "Wake Up," drawn from the band's debut. "That is one amazing song. That song is like, kind of mind-blowing. That blew my mind the other day.
"I mean, I knew they were good and nice guys and stuff, but I kind of had a whole new respect. I was like ... they're amazing."
