For an album inspired by death, Funeral seems surprisingly, almost uncomfortably full. Where conventional wisdom would suggest stripped-down spare melodies and muted vocals, to represent loss, Arcade Fire opts for lush orchestras and swelling choruses. In the band’s alternative vision, the spirits of the dead—by turns protective and threatening— never truly pass on. Instead, they continue to dominate our thoughts and physical spaces. While in “Une Année Sans Lumière” these presences are a source of anxiety (“If you see a shadow/Something’s there”), in “Haiti” they are a source of hope.
Musically, “Haiti” calls to mind the country’s natural beauty with an untroubled, almost offensively placid Caribbean-inspired guitar riff. Yet over this idyllic soundscape, Régine Chassagne describes the restless spirits of her murdered ancestors and other victims of the country’s Duvalier dictatorship taking back the county’s nights, its forests, and its seas (“Soon we will reclaim the earth”). The landscape, which appears so beautiful at its surface, is literally soaked in the blood of her ancestors and as the death toll rises, the army of the dead continues to grow. Chassagne presents redemption and justice as possibilities in the real world, not some imagined afterlife.
The themes of spirituality and permanence that Arcade Fire explores in “Haiti” appear throughout the band’s later works, eventually setting the foundation for 2013’s Reflektor, a concept album based in part on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. There, as in Funeral, the band embraces the world of the spirits with ambivalence. The constant presence of the dead is a source of both solace and pain.
