Arcade Fire @ SECC, 12 Dec

In a venue known to take no prisoners, Arcade Fire’s flop-haired frontman Win Butler sensibly asks tonight’s bulging SECC crowd to meet the band in the middle. He needn’t have wasted his breath. The audience are, unsurprisingly, euphoric at the mere presence of the Canadian eight-piece, creating quite a buzz anyway, but it’s the group themselves doing the legwork.

By the time third song Keep The Car Running and follow up Laika are dropped, indelible Cheshire cat grins are slapped on faces stretching back to the rafters. At these moments, Arcade Fire seem untouchable, with crowd-pleasing, multi-instrumentalist William ‘brother of Win’ Butler epitomising the atmosphere with his ‘ADHD kid with a Jim’ll Fix It medallion’ routine. From there they hardly let up, though Mountains Beyond Mountains is a little muddy and ill-placed perhaps, a pity as Régine Chassagne proves to be their secret weapon at other points tonight.

A slow-burning Rococo gets things back on track immediately, its stomping chorus chant exploding with pin-point accuracy. Win eventually takes up his mantle of doom-mongering preacher on We Used To Wait’s thrilling coda, though he seems to have lightened up since the apocalyptic Neon Bible tour.

A stunning finale of Power Out quickly segued with Rebellion (Lies) near brings the house to its knees, but of course we all know there’ll be an encore with that song still in the bag. Win introduces Wake Up with his Dad’s description of “that Scottish war song,” launching into its one-chord guitar salvo before the entire arena joins in, arms aloft, for the near-ecclesiastical liturgy of the chorus. It’s an obvious send-off, writ large, but one that needed to happen. [Darren Carle]