All that hate for Arcade Fire's new album? Win Butler finds it 'tremendously exciting'

Before Win Butler and Regine Chassagne were married - and before their band, Arcade Fire, became one of the most passionately beloved young rock groups in the world - they took a trip to visit Butler's parents in his hometown of Houston, where folks pride themselves, according to the frontman, on how aggressively they crank their air conditioning.

"I remember you were talking to a family friend and they asked you what you were into," Butler recalled with Chassagne this week. "You said you liked gardening, and they were like, 'Gardening? You mean, like, outside? Ugh.'

"They couldn't even contain their disgust."

It was perhaps the only negative feedback any member of Arcade Fire would hear for the next decade and change.

Until last summer, that is.

Formed in the early 2000s in Montreal, where Butler moved to attend McGill University, Arcade Fire earned countless fawning reviews with its debut album, "Funeral." In 2007, Bruce Springsteen