Arcade Fire’s indie upset

By August Brown

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

Arcade Fire is likely the first band to play an L.A. hard-core punk space on a Friday and follow it up with a Grammy album of the year award on a Sunday.

The Montreal indie rock band’s victory was one of the biggest upsets in recent Grammy history, with a visibly stunned frontman Win Butler thanking the Staples Center crowd before playing a second song at the ceremony simply, as he put it in his speech, “because we like music.”

The seven-strong ensemble, fronted by the husband-and-wife duo Regine Chassagne and Butler, has grown from a cult band beloved by indie websites such as Pitchfork to album chart-toppers with last year’s “The Suburbs.” They’re following U2 and Radiohead’s legacy of mainstreaming ambitious rock music in their career arc.

But Arcade Fire has done it on an indie label, Merge, without any smash individual singles. And while the other artists in the category — Lady Gaga, Eminem, Katy Perry and Lady Antebellum — have platinum albums under their belts, “The Suburbs” has sold just 486,000 copies.

Its turn in the Grammys spotlight showed it to be the rare band that has ascended to music world fame without the traditional commercial compromises, as evinced by its hush-hush conquest of L.A.’s underground just a few nights before. Fans camped outside for upward of 12 hours to buy $30 tickets to the show at the Ukrainian Cultural Center.

Inside, the band seemed thrilled to be holed up in a bunker with a few hundred fans who slept outside record stores to see its 90-minute set. By the time a brave young fan broke hipster decorum and crowd-surfed through the encore of “Keep the Car Running,” the room went berserk and the band members grinned like they hadn’t seen this in years.

However, fans’ surprise at the intimacy of this set was more than equaled by the band’s entirely unexpected embrace by Grammy voters.