CD of the Week

ARCADE FIRE
Neon Bible Arcade Fire/Universal Music  ****

How do you follow a classic album like Funeral? How do you come up with a set of songs to match and better an album that set off so many explosions and caused so many reverberations? For Arcade Fire, it took a year in an old church outside Montreal, a day or two with Calexico's brass players, the assistance of an orchestra in Bupadest, the title of a John Kennedy Toole novel and another batch of epic, anthemic passion to put Neon Bible into place.

What's obvious is that the many shadows and spectres haunting Win Butler's sleepless nights still make for enthralling songs. You'll find Butler's troubled spirits at large on Intervention, Keep the Car Running and a supersized No Cars Go, where the singer's God-fearing growls and religious intensity stand out in the midst of the musical tempest raging around him. Then there are the Springsteen-sized songs - the bravehearted Antichrist Television Blues and Windowsill, with its uneasy, insistent coda - that turn into monsters with every listen.

Even songs which appear slight and slender on first listen (such as the gentle wisps and sways on the just-about-there title track or the aching, bruised, captivating lament on My Body Is a Cage) unpeel layers upon layers to reveal dazzling moments. Funeral, it seems, was not a fluke. www.neonbible.com