Arcade Fire's first album, 2004's "Funeral," was a triumphant elegy, as the Montreal collective paid tribute to a roster of friends and relatives who had died while the record took shape.

Death figures prominently in the band's follow-up, but "Neon Bible" (on Merge) is no celebration. It's a dark album, full of fear and lined with wounded innocence like so much tattered fabric. It's also a theatrical record, stacked with majestic musical passages and lyrics brimming with the portentous sincerity of a high school drama club staging its own passion play.

Drama is a core component of Arcade Fire. The musicians dress like turn-of-the-century vaudevillians, done up in woolen finery — vests and suspenders and Victorian dresses, with music to match. Their songs employ hurdy-gurdy, pipe organ and a Hungarian orchestra, and they recorded most of "Neon Bible" in a century-old church an hour outside Montreal that they converted into a studio.

This passion play, however, is a chronicle of decay. Frontman Win Butler sings with firm resolve that communicates disillusion and, somehow, surprise at the hypocrisy he sees around him: a cozy relationship between religion and consumerism, the exploitation of fear for political means and the washed-out morality of waging war with no foreseeable end.

"Working for the church while your life falls apart," he laments on "Intervention." "Singin' hallelujah with the fear in your heart."

You can almost envision the accompanying stage directions: a darkened stage. Butler enters from right; a lone spotlight follows as he walks deliberately to center, faces audience and unburdens heart.

The album resembles a piece of musical theater in more than tone. It's the structure, too, as scene-setting songs build to sweeping showstoppers. The opening number, "Black Mirror," establishes a mood of unease, pulsing with faint fanfare from piano and horns and subtle counterpoint from woodwinds. Butler describes a black mirror that casts no reflection but sees all and "cares not for your dreams," while singer and keyboardist Regine Chassagne (his wife) sings a contrasting melody behind him.

The songs grow in intensity through "Intervention," which erupts from a baroque organ fugue and expands to include the usual rock-band elements, strings and a choir chiming in on backing vocals. The cycle repeats with "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations" and builds again through "Windowsill," which starts with a gloomy, repeating two-note guitar figure and swells as drums, then piano, strings and horns pick up the tune and propel it forward over Butler's ever-louder voice.

These 11 songs comprise an ambitious song cycle, and the songwriting on "Neon Bible" is stronger and more focused than it was on "Funeral." It's perhaps a sign of the times that Arcade Fire's earnest bearing occasionally feels quaint — this is an age of cavalier self-absorption, after all, when superstardom could be just a reality-TV audition away.

Then again, it's reassuring to think there's a musical movement afoot that rejects the reigning cynicism and presses on in search of the slightest sliver of authentic emotion. For all its fear and existential anguish, "Neon Bible" holds out hope that such a thing exists somewhere.

Singin' hallelujah, indeed.