100 favourite songs: #66: "Rebellion (Lies)" - The Arcade Fire

Tucked away near the end of Funeral, this song didn’t immediately strike me as one of the record’s standout tracks — it always caused my ears to prick up and the rhythms would catch me, but to the extent that I thought of the song at all, it was as a fairly minor number nestled amidst the more immediately towering songs around it (coming immediately before show-stopping closer “In The Backseat” is a hella thankless position for it).

But repeated listening has really brought out the especial brilliance of “Rebellion (Lies)”. I’ve heard Funeral described in terms of its dirge-momentum or something very similar (I don’t know, I might have written those words myself), and that’s just exactly right for this song in particular. It’d be possible to unpick the threads, to trace backwards how the different instrumental and vocal lines layer and interweave into a stadium-bestriding whole, but really what would be the point? More than anything else, “Rebellion (Lies)” strikes me as the soundtrack to a revolution not yet staged, its vaguely martial cadences, ever-forwards drive and lyrical subversiveness going only part of the way to explaining that impression, the rest, I think, being attributable to something more difficult to identify — perhaps, it’s the scent of endings and originality, of something new and astonishing being wrought before our eyes.