Police Disco Lights

Funeral starts with “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”. The four Neighborhood songs make Funeral a semi-concept album about relationships and dismal diaries. Not yet clear the location and whereabouts of this vicinity but it’s a giant pile of forgotten manhood over there. Could be Canada, but could be Russia as well (and Russia is much more likely), or maybe the 60s Prague. Win Butler starts it off singing in grief, as though it’s a nightly hymn to disbelief and distances (from one apartment to another).

As a mid-school kid and as my first true romance experience I used to implement this attempt of window-tunnels. Me on my room and she in hers. We sometimes didn’t even have to talk. It was a small two-bedroom apartment. Therefore the distance was not that much. It was pleasing and dangerous at the same time. Neither of us wanted our parents to know about this window-talk so the lights were off as if we were sleeping.

The four “Neighborhood” songs on Funeral are also chronologically ordered. So the kid howling in anxiety and fear could easily stay a kid and not an adult. He doesn’t care about the words so he thinks of physical solutions in his immature mind for tunnels though he has his strong imagination power. It’s like the two lovers are locked inside their rooms with their parents fighting in the living room. So climbing a mutual chimney could somehow connect their hands. Well, I thought the chimney leads to open air! So, that’s another proof the story teller is still a child.

But this surreal departure is nothing temporary. The kids are singing their “Exit Music” apparently. They are least likely to return to the neighborhood. They are destined to grow old in the snow. “Snow” is probably the best metaphor found on the song and in case we don’t take it as metaphor, snow is the north. But it could literary be translated as “time and its hardships”. Snow could leave your hair grow long (this is something a school boy may need to experience because of school limitations), wipe away the past, and cause your skin become thicker but these issues all comes easy when you have reached your freedom beside your beloved soul. She will erase everything traumatic and unbearable that lies in your memory by singing you beautiful hymnals. This is where music can act as a magic, an eraser, or a painkiller.

But this memory erasing is also problematic. It makes your future look unclear and difficult. It leaves our babies nameless so it could not work out without flashbacks. Flashbacks to where we were born and then when we were named: our parents’ bedrooms and the bedrooms of our friends. Isn’t that a childish wish? Impossible but immaculate; The best possible way to start an album with. Funeral starts with a motivation, an escape plan. We’re not dealing with a happy family here: dealing with a boy named “Laika” ain’t that easy.