For the second straight year, an act with Triangle connections will be center-stage at next February's Grammy Awards. Where it was Arcade Fire this past year, next year it will be Bon Iver -- whose frontman Justin Vernon used to call Raleigh home.

Bon Iver scored nominations in the prestigious record and song of the year categories for "Holocene," a track from the group's eponymous 2011 album. That was part of a four-nomination haul including best alternative album and even best new artist.

The latter category is odd because "Bon Iver" was the group's third release -- and its first two both made the top half of the Billboard 200 album sales charts. One of the other best-new-artist nominees also has North Carolina connections, Fayetteville rapper J. Cole, nominated on the strength of his chart-topping album "Cole World: The Sideline Story."

Industry observer Sean Ross, executive editor of the Ross On Radio newsletter, cites Nicki Minaj as this year's worthiest best-new-artist nominee. But he predicts that Minaj won't win because she and J. Cole "will cancel each other out," which might allow Bon Iver to sneak in there the way Arcade Fire did for album of the year back in February.

"Then it's Bon Iver's people-who-propelled-Arcade-Fire vote versus The Band Perry's combination mainstream-audience vote and the never-insigificant 'I don't really follow new music but I hear they're good' vote," Ross said.

The nominations were announced Wednesday night at a Grammy concert at Staples Center in Los Angeles, where the awards will be presented Feb. 12. As expected, Adele's top-selling "21" album led the field with six nominations. Bruno Mars, Mumford & Sons, Rihanna and Lady Gaga all picked up multiple nominations in the major categories, too.

As for other nominations of North Carolina interest:

Eric Church, an Appalachian State alumnus from Granite Falls, was nominated for best country album, up against a field including Taylor Swift, Lady Antebellum and Jason Aldean.

North Carolina School of the Arts alumnus Jim Lauderdale, a two-time winner in past years, earned a nomination for best bluegrass album -- and also appears on a Tom T. Hall tribute album nominated for best children's album. Among Lauderdale's competition in the bluegrass category will be Brevard's Steep Canyon Rangers, sharing a nomination with comedian/banjo player Steve Martin.

Asheville guitarist Warren Haynes, a veteran of Gov't Mule and Allman Brothers, was nominated for best blues album.

Durham-based Merge Records, which captured last year's best-album Grammy with Arcade Fire, picked up a best-recording-package nomination for the expanded deluxe version of the same album. Zooey Deschanel, who records with M. Ward as the Merge duo She & Him, was also nominated in best song written for visual media, for the "Winnie the Pooh" song "So Long."

Marsalis Music, the label of Durham jazzman Branford Marsalis, scored in the category of best large jazz ensemble album for "Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook."

Levon Helm's live album "Ramble at the Ryman," nominated for best Americana album, includes "Anna Lee," written by Greensboro's Laurelyn Dossett. That song has already been on one Grammy-winning album, Helm's "Dirt Farmer," which won best tradtional folk album in 2008.

ADDENDUM: Another nominee with local connections is recording engineer Miles Walker, who grew up in Raleigh and mostly works out of Atlanta. Walker engineered records that scored a total of eight nominations, including hits by Rhianna, Katy Perry and Wiz Khalifa, sharing the nomination on two of them -- Rhianna's album-of-the-year nod for "Loud," and Perry's record-of-the-year nomination for "Firework."

SECOND ADDENDUM: I received a pretty detailed response about who does and does not qualify as a "new" artist in Grammyland from another industry pundit, former USA Today music editor Ken Barnes. I'm fascinated in wonky stuff like this, so I'm passing along the whole thing:

As a 25-year Grammy voter, I've watched the definition of a new artist "evolve" from super-strict (one prior guest appearance on someone else's album disqualified Whitney Houston from new-artist consideration in the '80s) to the current, almost-anything-goes guidelines.

It's basically a wording problem at this point; if the category were called "best emerging artist" or "breakthrough artist" or something like that, it wouldn't be such a communications problem. Basically what the Grammys try to do is establish whether, with a particular album, an artist has achieved a breakthrough to the general public. If Bon Iver was considered a critical/indie/minority-taste hit prior to this record, then the Grammys would declare them eligible. If the Academy felt a breakthrough had occurred with a previous record, based on sales, airplay, critical acclaim, buzz, mass acceptance, etc., then no.

With only rather generally worded guidelines, it's always dicey, and standards tend to waffle. So there's always one or two "new artists" that stick in journalists' craws, for good reason.

RALEIGH -- For the past two decades, the mainstream has been awaiting the breakthrough act that would take twangy Americana folk-rock to the masses. Finally we have that band, and wouldn't you know they're British.

That would be Mumford & Sons, who played for an adoring and soldout throng Wednesday night at the Downtown Raleigh Amphitheater. The London quartet's "Sigh No More" album has been a top-10 fixture ever since they played the Grammy Awards back in February. And at first glance, it's hard to fathom why them and not, say, Concord's similarly styled Avett Brothers.

But as their live show demonstrated, Mumford & Sons' British-ness might be their best attribute. Not unlike the Beatles channeling Little Richard back to America, they bring an outlook and sensibility that's just different enough to blow up huge over here.

Even though their instrumentation includes banjo, upright bass, mandolin and a lot more acoustic than electric guitar, Mumford & Sons write epic songs for large settings. If Chris Martin had adapted a freak-folk Avett Brothers template instead of Radiohead and U2, you can imagine Coldplay turning out this way.

Wednesday was positively sweltering, but it was worth braving the evening heat to see opener The Low Anthem. The group's records have a delicate atmosphere that doesn't seem like it would translate live, but they were fantastic. All four members showed impressive range, changing instruments almost every song. Along with standard guitars, bass and drums, various tunes featured clarinet, fiddle, saw, harmonium, a strange disc-and-bow contraption I couldn't identify and even cell-phone feedback on the last song. At just the right instant, a train horn chimed in from the Amtrak station nearby -- a lovely moment of synchronicity.

The heat had relented a bit by the time the headliners came out, although frontman Marcus Mumford appeared to be wilting. "We're very much like our fathers, we don't do shorts," he said. "We're British!"

Mumford's quavering yowl is similar to a less-annoying Dave Matthews, and he has a knack for the perfect dramatic build-up. "Roll Away Your Stone" started with a  Baroque guitar figure before exploding into an anthemic sing-along. And when Mumford got behind the drums on a new song called "Lover of the Light," he drove the rhythm with a martial stomp.

Mumford & Sons have just one album out, so a fair quantity of the 15-song set consisted of new songs ranging from so-so ("Broken Crown") to pretty amazing ("Lover's Eyes," announced as the newest song of all). But of course, the radio hits went over best of all, particularly "Little Lion Man" and "Winter Winds." The latter song came during the encore, with Avett Brothers cellist Joe Kwon sitting in.

They saved their biggest hit of all for last, and the crowd erupted at the first note of "The Cave" from Mumford's acoustic guitar. And yeah, you could say withholding their signature hit until the end was kind of cheesy. Nevertheless, the look on Mumford's face as he took in the applause was pure joy. Nice to see a band breaking through, and having the sense to enjoy their moment.

david.menconi@newsobserver.com or blogs.newsobserver.com/beat or 919-829-4759

Here's another excellent little coup for Concord's Avett Brothers: They're playing Sunday night's Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, even though they're not nominated. But wait, it gets better: They're playing with Bob Dylan, as part of a three-song "special salute to acoustic music" that also includes Mumford & Sons (a.k.a. the British Avett Brothers) in addition to Dylan. That might be even cooler than the Johnny Cash star turn the Avetts did last year. "Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise" is on the set list.

The Grammys will be on CBS from 8 to 11:30 p.m. Sunday.