Arcade Fire: gospel fervor

“BETWEEN the click of the light and the start of the dream .... “

When the Arcade Fire came to that phrase during the song “No Cars Go” at the Greek Theatre on Tuesday, the band emphasized the image by hushing its instruments and letting the audience clap along to a line that describes the setting for many of its songs.

It’s that place where the confining hold of waking reality gives way to the freedom and the vivid disorder of the subconscious, and the 10 musicians physically embodied that image in the calculated chaos of their 90-minute performance. The show was a circus-like swirl as drums flew high into the air and cymbals crashed together above the heads of the pit patrons. The musicians, constantly moving from one station to another and exchanging instruments on almost every song, were like a church choir maddened by rock ‘n’ roll, or a rock band endowed with a spiritual purpose.

It’s been two years since the Montreal-based Arcade Fire became one of indie rock’s biggest out-of-nowhere success stories, but in that time its L.A. appearances have been limited to some early club dates and supporting-act slots.

So this week’s two-night stand at the Greek was its overdue baptism as a large-theater headliner in L.A., and the intense, cathartic performance was the kind of thing that makes all the current head-scratching and doomsaying about rock’s dwindling album sales and cultural prominence seem irrelevant, at least for the moment. The numbers might say one thing, but the music and sense of community generated Tuesday proclaimed an urgent, vital connection.

Singer Win Butler, reared in Texas and polished in a New England prep school, commanded the stage despite all the action surrounding him, as square-jawed handsome as a silent-movie cowboy hero, or maybe a charismatic young Billy Graham. There is something evangelical in his intense delivery, and the Arcade Fire’s recently released second album, “The Neon Bible,” is a scathing appraisal of a corrupt popular culture -- one the band depicts as, variously, a black mirror, a rising tide and the golden calf of the title song. “Not much chance for survival if the neon Bible is right,” Butler sang.

But this isn’t a grumpy bunch out to lecture against a good time. There’s purpose and passion behind every song, which Butler writes with his wife, multi-instrumentalist and occasional singer Regine Chassagne. But rock’s spirit of liberation is foremost, and there was an almost daffy quality to their beaming faces and manic energy. And every yearning for faith was balanced by a sobering depiction of the horrors that have been carried out in the name of faith.

The band is fearless about hitching epic poetry to operatic pop, and it rose to that challenge Tuesday, concentrating its unconventional instrumentation into a rock grandeur. Two violinists and two horn players, supplemented periodically by accordion, hurdy-gurdy and mandolin, broadened and softened the more standard rock textures, and they’ve mastered the E Street Band’s trick of getting the place as hot as possible and then raising the temperature. Indeed, the band played what would seem to be its best cards -- the soaring, organ-powered anthem “Intervention” and the searing “(Antichrist Television Blues)” -- fairly early in the set and still had a knockout punch for the finale, pairing “Rebellion (Lies),” from the first album, “Funeral,” with the new, apocalyptic blues variation “Keep the Car Running.”

By that time, the light had clicked and the dream was in full force.

richard.cromelin@latimes.com