100 favourite songs: #58: "Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)" - The Arcade Fire

“Wake Up” is more extravagant and immediately striking, “In The Backseat” more spine-tingling, and “Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)” more edgy and danceable, but “Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)” is my favourite song on Funeral, and I think that it succeeds so well because it’s the song on which the Fire’s grandiose and epic leanings are best synthesised with the band’s capacity for understatement and careful detail and craft; the result is a towering piece of orchestral pop in a constant state of tension, seeming in every bar about to burst forth and yet always held in check at the same instant, so that the climax, when it comes, doesn’t need to be overblown or LOUD (which it’s not) to be completely and utterly cathartic (which it is). Magnifique.