Top Album of the Decade

I originally made a list of my Top 25 albums of the 2000's. Sadly, wonderful Mac application "Stickies" deleted the entire thing. So, rather than that, I'll write up my favorite album of the past 10 years.

Neon Bible/the Arcade Fire

I understand that most people- at least 75%- would disagree with this choice. Even if I had chosen Funeral, most fans would quarrel between which album is superior. Although Funeral is largely considered, and very well may be, a superior album, the feel on this album is non-paralleled by any other artist this entire decade.

While Funeral was an album filled with youthful joy, sorrows, and hopes, the Arcade Fire took a large maturation leap with Neon Bible. For the most part, the album was about 3 things: religion, the problems popping up in modern society/America, and the youthful escapism that came from those issues.

Opener "Black Mirror" sets the dark tone: "I walked down to the ocean after waking from a nightmare"; what follows is a dark venture through the mind of someone surpressed with the everyday worries in America, and how those have evolved into such evil and big forces:

"Mirror, mirror on the wall
Show me where their bombs will fall"

Singer and songwriter Win Butler mixes these dark messages with escapist interludes "Keep the Car Running" and "No Cars Go". Proclaiming a place where no cars, planes, or boats go, Win sings "Us kids know". Hoping for a simpler time runs through the veins of the whole album: however, it seems almost unattainable. When even Time Magazine has dubbed the 2000's "the Decade From Hell", you know things aren't in very good shape. Neon Bible, in that sense, is very easy to relate to.

Closing track, "My Body is A Cage", cements the same depressing ethos one-hundred fold. Although the 2000's were a breaking year for all sorts of artists, genres, and scenes, nothing captured both the horrendous lows of modern day living and wistful, youthful escapism as well as Neon Bible. Everyone has their "own" album: the Arcade Fire gave America theirs.