Arcade Fire

At the Air Canada Centre on Nov. 3

Oh, right: Arcade Fire gets to play arenas these days because Arcade Fire was meant to play arenas.

Prone to exuberant theatrics and big, anthemic statements from the get-go, the Montreal ensemble was never really your average, shrinking-violet Canadian indie band. But, despite a recent habit of getting in its own arty way with a bit too much self-conscious self-sabotage, it demonstrated at the Air Canada Centre (ACC) on Friday night — and no doubt will again with a second show at the venue Saturday — that it’s thoroughly deserving of the near-superstar status that’s been accorded it.

I say near-superstar status because Arcade Fire doesn’t quite have the broad reach of, say, a U2 or a Coldplay just yet, mainly because it’s chosen to challenge rather than pander to its audience on its divisively received last couple of records, 2013’s Reflektor and this year’s electro-shocked dance detour Everything Now. But however one might feel about what the ambitious septet is up to at a given moment, seeing Arcade Fire perform live tends to make one a believer again.

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This crew — which, to be perfectly honest, is twice the live band U2 or Coldplay will ever be — never phones it in, and never has that been more apparent on a Toronto date than it was at the ACC on Friday. Thirteen years on from Funeral, the band is still attacking every note and every grand pronouncement as if it’s very collective life depended on it. Arcade Fire is as good as it’s ever been right now. Period.

It probably helped that Friday’s sold-out ACC date was the biggest and rowdiest show of Arcade Fire’s Infinite Content tour thus far, coming after a run of dates in Canada and the States that have seen the group, stung somewhat by mixed reviews for Everything Now and some unintended blowback from the album’s tongue-in-cheek marketing rollout (branded Arcade Fire fidget spinners and breakfast cereal, anyone?), playing to a few half-empty hockey rinks in Canada and the States.

Here, however, in decidedly un-Toronto-like fashion, the crowd was properly lit up, on its feet and loudly frothing at the mouth from the moment a video’d-in announcer ushered the band, “weighing in at a collective 2100 pounds,” to an in-the-round stage set up like a boxing ring in the middle of the packed ACC bowl as if we were about to witness a heavyweight title fight. And Arcade Fire — co-bandleaders (and husband and wife) Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, multi-instrumentalist Will Butler, guitarist Richard Reed Parry, bassist Tim Kingsbury, violinist Sarah Neufeld and drummer Jeremy Gara, whose drumkit frequently rotated at centre stage while his bandmates gamboled madly to and fro about him from microphone to microphone and vantage point to vantage point — responded in kind, consistently drawing on the energy in the room and jacking it up even more for a solid two hours that saw not a single lull between a juicy opening run at the disco-rific “Everything Now” and “Signs of Life” and Funeral’s uproariously received “Rebellion (Lies)” and the monster encore singalong to “Wake Up” that pretty much had to happen before everyone left the venue or it would have been burned to the ground by the mob in disappointment.

The only real pause for breath came when the video screens boxing in the stage at the ceiling requested we turn on our lights for a gentle cellphone-starfield reading of the title track from 2007’s Neon Bible and an angsty “My Body is a Cage” that, one feared, might finally signal a diminishment of the set list’s power. But no, cue “Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)” and “The Suburbs” and a blistering “Ready to Start” and the place was, well, on fire again.

Amazingly, too, it only got more intense from there, with Chassagne’s lilting star turn on “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” giving way to total dance-party devastation on “Reflektor” and a heart-bursting “Afterlife.” One might have expected Everything Now’s “Creature Comfort” to suck the wind out of the sails a little bit after all that, but as it turns out Win Butler et al. provided an answer to the song’s troubled-pop-star quandary — “On and on / I don’t know what I want / On and on / I don’t know if I want it” — by making it every bit as bruising as the rest of the set list. Does Arcade Fire want it? The answer is a resounding “yes.”

Props to them, too, for inviting their Toronto pals Broken Social Scene — with whom, Butler pointed out, Arcade Fire had once opened for Royal City at La Sala Rossa in Montreal in 2002 — to open both ACC dates.

The Toronto indie-rock institution, for its part, appeared completely unfazed by the prospect of playing its first hometown show in a venue that normally houses the Toronto Maple Leafs, perhaps the oldest and most esteemed Toronto institution of all.

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Knocked down a peg from the headlining status it last enjoyed at home before a fawning Field Trip festival crowd this past June and staring down a half-empty, half-indifferent ACC — “So who are we listening to?” asked my seatmate as she sat down mid-set — Broken Social Scene just did what it always does, delivering cracking big-room fare in the form of tunes such as a Leslie Feist-aided “7/4 Shoreline,” a juiced-up “Fire Eyed Boy” and a riff-tastic “Cause = Time” but also delving into amorphous, crowd-oblivious self-indulgence from time to time as if it were still back onstage at the old Ted’s Wrecking Yard.

Keep on keepin’ it real, Broken Social Scene. And bonus points for dedicating a final, towering assault on “Meet Me in the Basement” to departed band pal Gord Downie.

One of the best nights out Toronto has seen in awhile. I’m kinda jealous of the people going tonight.