REVIEW: Arcade Fire rewrite the rulebook at Birmingham show

Arena rock. It's one of the most dread phrases in the lexicon of popular music. The connotations are legion and unpleasant: hollow, corporate, bombastic, sanitised, homogenised. It's the term increasingly applied to Arcade Fire, on the not unreasonable grounds they they are a rock band who play arenas. But the good news is that, on this evidence, they may be the saviours of the genre.

Surrounding this tour and the release of the 2017 album Everything Now is a wide-ranging conceit intended to satirise the tawdry commercial machine driving contemporary culture. Some will no doubt find irony in the fact that a band signed to Sony and selling tickets for £55 a pop are trying to position themselves as outsiders and mere onlookers, while others may sigh at the array of pretend adverts and general sense of information overload evoked before the show; it's basically what U2 were doing 25 years ago. The good news though is that this all done away with pretty much the moment the band step in to the venue.

They do in a manner showing their ascent to their lofty status has come at no cost to their idiosyncratic and oddball charm. This tour is presented in the round, with the stage at the centre of the auditorium and resembling, at least at first, a boxing ring. The band stride in through the crowd ,big-fight style, while an announcer declares their various achievements and accolades. It's amusing and endearing, self-mocking without being overly self-conscious. They clamber over the ropes, band member Regine Chassagne rings a bell, and there begins a set which shows why they've got to where they've got to.

Proceedings start with Everything Now, which came out last year but already feels like it's existed forever. The keyboard riff soars, but with a tinge of melancholy; it's Arcade Fire summed up in 22 notes. The song is anthemic in the best way, big-hearted arms-aloft singalong material with wit and bite and imagination. It's hard to imagine anything they subsequently come up with bettering it as set-opener. Indeed, one the features of the night is just how good the most recent songs sound: last year's album, also called Everything Now, was treated with derision by many critics, which seems appallingly unfair for a record containing songs like the exquisitely shimmering Electric Blue, the driving and desperate Put Your Money on Me and the pulverising and snarling Creature Comfort, which are all among the highlights of the night.

Not that there's any shortage of treats for fans of their earlier material. From their 2004 debut album Funeral, the pounding Rebellion (Lies) gets a suitably shouty airing two songs in, Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) has retained all its urgent longing and Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) closes the main set in suitably cataclysmic style. The tender yet eerie title track from 2007's Neon Bible is a smartphone-light moment, while The Suburbs, from the 2010 album of the same name, blends the jaunty with the keening. Rococo is elegantly malevolent, while Ready to Start has a nagging, jittery grandeur; all are met with wild acclaim from the crowd.