Arcade Fire

For a while there, Arcade Fire seemed to favor small and oddball venues like decommissioned churches in which to play their rousing pop-rock and smack themselves on the head with drumsticks. Would their act tonight suffer from being staged at the large outdoor venue of Randall’s Island? It didn’t seem so. It started off slowly with “Black Mirror” but picked up swiftly with religious revival-style choruses, playing of the full pipe organ the band had shipped in, manic drumming and the dramatic unfurling of several banners.

The stage show centered around video projected onto not only the rear curtain on the stage but onto a half-dozen manhole-cover-sized white screens atop tall stands that were positioned on points of an arc across the stage, fed live from perhaps a few dozen tiny cameras secreted around the set, including a few mounted to mike stands that offered intimate close-ups of individual band members performing. The video was shown and cut on the fly, tinged with a variety of color effects, giving it all a vaguely propagandistic air.

The opening acts put on a fine show, too. I unexpectedly liked LCD Soundsystem, which is mostly a pudgy white guy lurching around and shrieking over constant staccato drum lines, rubbery bass guitar, and synths. The music reminded me of an updated Happy Mondays, or songs like “Temptation” from New Order’s club-music heyday, the ones that would go on forever, but in a good way.

Arcade Fire Setlist

1. Black Mirror
2. Keep The Car Running
3. Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)
4. No Cars Go
5. Haiti
6. I’m Sleeping In A Submarine
7. My Body Is A Cage
8. Cold Wind
9. Intervention
10. (Antichrist Television Blues)
11. The Well And The Lighthouse
12. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
13. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
14. Rebellion (Lies)

Encore

1. Headlights Look Like Diamonds
2. Wake Up

(setlist via brooklynvegan.com)