The first thing you notice about Arcade Fire in concert is that Win Butler isn’t who you notice first.

If you just listen to Butler’s voice on Funeral, the way he yelps, stammers, cries, and testifies, wavering between religious ecstasy and utter madness, often forcing the music to swell up and follow him along through sheer willpower and lung capacity, you’d expect him to command a stage accordingly. Hell, whose vocal stylings are most often cited when describing Butler’s? That’s right, Conor Oberst. I rest my case.

And yet there he was under the bright lights of the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta, being overshadowed by the endearing self-consciousness of his wife Regine Chassagne and the now-infamous seizures of spastic Nap Dynamite doppleganger Richard Parry. Sure, Butler plays at being Kurt Cobain with his stringy hair and disconsolate gaze, but he replaces KC’s self-martyrdom and uncontrolled chaos with baby fat and clear-eyed fixation (plus he looks more like the bassist from Ben Folds Five anyway).

I mention this accidental disappearing act only because it’s emblematic of the band’s well-publicized ensemble character, which I maybe didn’t understand and appreciate until I actually witnessed this album lived out in front of a thousand people rather than trapped in my car CD changer, where it sounded instead like a whole microbiotic universe crammed into a single petri dish.

Now, if there’s one adjective that’s guaranteed to get me to like a band or a record, it’s “childlike,” and I don’t mean childlike as in simplistic, because real children are almost never simple.

To me, the Arcade Fire embodies and expresses that other, darker side of childhood opposite the one so meticulously conveyed by the Fiery Furnaces or the Decemberists. Those bands capture the part of being a kid that’s all about fantasy and cognitive dissonance, spending hours building perfect sand castles and delighting in nothing more than knocking them down.

What the Arcade Fire understands, by contrast, is the enormity of childhood, the outsized sense of panic mingled with awe mingled with invincibility. While the Friedbergers’ or Colin Meloy’s visions of youth given free rein depend on willful solitude, a physical and intellectual hiding place where elaborate fancy can take flight from precocious minds, Butler, Chassagne, Parry and all the rest seek shelter from the storm that’s always on the horizon. Parents are vaguely-shaped, impossibly immense gods, kinda like the adults on Rugrats, and all their triumphs and (more frequent) shortcomings take on superhuman dimensions.

So why exactly does this quaint little indie-rock drum circle connect so deeply with the thousand or so kids in attendance? Is it just a covert strategy to ferret out all the goopy marshmallow scenesters, the unsuspecting, secretly emo chum in snark-infested waters?

While I’m consciously trying not to step into any rockist traps about the arduousness of creation or the worthiness of obstinacy, I think it has something to do with the fact that the Arcade Fire understands what Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder and their own stylistic mentors the Talking Heads understood, what Sleater-Kinney and Bjork and Outkast understand today, which is the value of truly, unabashedly joyful music made in the face of the greatest emotional obstacles, the deepest sadness and heartache. The Arcade Fire isn’t Win Butler up on stage fetishizing his pain, allowing it to turn him into just another indie-rock Christ figure. The Arcade Fire is a whole band taking all of its collective pain and tragedy and loss and turning it into something glorious and open, into a dialogue that allows room for everyone in the crowd to participate as well, putting their own pain in and getting rapture in return.