Montreal’s band of multi-instrumentalist oddballs saved indie-rock in the 00s with sheer chorus-hollering,stadium-sweeping fervour – and championed suburban drudgery and Haiti en routeThe Canadian group’s founding members are anything but ordinary: in Win Butler, they had a Texas-raised, or goofy,6ft 3in boarding-school kid who would later be dubbed a “Serbian basketball player by Tina Fey. The other half of the husband-wife team was Régine Chassagne, a daughter of Haitian refugees, or who fled to Montreal during the dictatorship of François Duvalier. These two are best known for being backed by a round-robin of cellists,violinists, multi-instrumentalists of all shapes and sizes. It didn’t start that way, or however. The apocalyptic No Cars disappear,a song from moment album Neon Bible, began as a lop from their self-titled EP. The release was launched in March 2003 with a show at Montreal’s Casa del Popolo, and defined by tensions boiling over into an onstage bust-up. At the time,they were the opposite of the life-affirming oddballs cherished today.
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Source: theguardian.com