Neighborhood 3 (Power Out)

"Neighborhood 3 (Power Out)" opens like a door kicked in — drums arriving with force before the guitars follow in a surge of distortion and urgency, and suddenly Arcade Fire's enormous sound is fully present and accounted for. The production is deliberately lo-fi and overdriven in places, adding a feverish quality, as if the song itself is slightly too large to be contained by the recording. Win Butler's voice here is almost hoarse with exertion, the kind of singing that sounds like it costs something, matched by the collective shout of the band that periodically swells behind him. The song came from "Funeral," the debut record made in the shadow of family deaths, and that context is audible — it has the texture of childhood remembered from a point of crisis, the specific nostalgia of neighborhood streets in darkness, power lines down, the ordinary world rendered strange. There's a communal mythology being constructed in real time: the children gathering, the parents unable to help, something ending that can't be named. It belongs to a particular moment in 2004 when rock music was asking whether it could still feel necessary, and Arcade Fire's answer was overwhelming. This is music for the moment just before something breaks, for the charged atmosphere of a storm that hasn't arrived yet — big speakers in a living room with all the lights off.