Funeral into widespread recognition and commercial success. The album entered the Billboard 200 chart, a first for Merge Records; it was also the fastest-seller in the label's history. By November 2005, the album had sold over half a million copies worldwide, and by March 2007 it had sold nearly 750,000 copies worldwide. The album is certified Gold by the Record Industry Association of America for over 500,000 copies sold in the US. Critical reception Funeral received universal acclaim from music critics and is commonly hailed as a modern classic. At Metacritic, the album has received an average score of 90, based on 33 reviews. It is put at one of the top 100 albums on Metacritic's list of highest scored albums of all time. AllMusic reviewer James Christopher Monger gave the album a rating of five stars out of five. He described it as "brave, empowering, and dusted with something that many of the indie-rock genre's more contrived acts desperately lack: an element of real danger." Rock critic Robert Christgau gave the album an A−, saying that Funeral was "...too fond of drama, but aware of its small place in the big world, and usually beautiful." Pitchfork gave the album a 9.7 out of 10 rating, and ultimately ranked the album #1 on their Top 50 Albums of 2004 list, as well as #2 on their Top 200 Albums of the 2000s list, after Radiohead's Kid A. Kludge called it a "glorious" debut album, in which Arcade Fire spins "elaborate art-rock full of passion and atmosphere." Drowned in Sound also highly praised Funeral. Reviewer Jesus Chigley called the album "...empowering and hopeful and euphoric all at once", saying that "it says everything there is to say about mortality and it does it in 10 tracks." Styluss Josh Drimmer gave Funeral an A, calling it "celebratory, emotionally rich and life-affirming". Tiny Mix Tapes gave the album five stars out of five; "Funeral," the reviewer wrote, "is like nothing you've heard before, and altogether familiar." Reviewing the album in February 2005, Dave Simpson of The Guardian called it "one of the year's best already, by a mile." Zeth Lundy of PopMatters complimented Funeral on its eccentricity, calling it "bizarre at turns and recognizable elsewhere, equally beautiful and harrowing, theatrical and sincere, defying categorization while attempting to create new genres." Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "Funerals are generally