"Neon Bible," the ominous dream of a second album from Arcade Fire [ tickets ], links its dark themes through such swift and driving music, it's hard to know whether to dance or cry.

It's probably meant to inspire both. When the crowded, now seven-member group from Montreal crashed into indie-rock stardom in 2004, they played song after song about death and loss. But the music was performed with ridiculous joy: all band members jumped, climbed into the rafters, walked out through the audience, used any objects possible (including each other) as instruments, and most notably sang--miked or not--like their bodies couldn't hold the sound in. It was much less "Funeral"--the name of that first album--than all out, old-fashioned revival.

So "Bible," at first, just feels like a natural extension. Here, still, are the full-band choruses, the gradual crescendos, the drama, all led by the potent vocals of core songwriter Win Butler, a towering singer in both stature and presence, and his soprano wife, Regine Chassagne. But there’s something new in this album, too. Full of instruments--accordion, pipe organ, hurdy-gurdy--that seem plucked from a haunted carnival, the songs share the big idea of religion in different, mostly faltering, levels of belief.

We have stories of violent seas, imagined heaven and fears of retribution: "Working for the Church while your family dies/You take what they give you/And you keep it inside," Butler scolds in "Intervention." In another, "Antichrist Television Blues," over hints of rockabilly, a man sees his only chance of salvation in getting his daughter to sing on TV.

Yet they somehow make all this bleakness enticing. "Keep the Car Running," with its road-song beat and screaming strings, is immediately addictive; "Black Mirror" sweeps up into pop-symphonic grandeur; and "No Cars Go" is a charging, jump-up-and-down anthem for anyone trying to escape something. As Butler almost whispers in the title song, in the world of this album, there may not be "much chance of survival," but there will be much rollicking, in-unison shouting and singing our godless hearts out before it all falls apart.