With hardening-wrapper installed, building linux-odroid-u2 package produces a kernel that does not boot. The fatal error on boot is "XZ-compressed data is corrupt." Uninstalling hardening-wrapper package (or building the kernel in a base-devel chroot) avoids the issue.
I'm reporting this here to potentially save others the diagnosis pain, but not sure what can be done about this "build-time conflict" at the distro level. I've added the hardening-wrapper to IgnorePkg in pacman.conf. This package appears to be listed only as a makedepend for several packages. I must have installed it at some point, only to hit this problem much later.