Arcade Fire, St John's, Smith Square, London <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fivestar -->

Despite its unpromising origins in a succession of family bereavements, Arcade Fire's Funeral wedged its way firmly into many hearts a couple of years ago, placing high in many year-end polls.

On the evidence of a few hearings, the follow-up Neon Bible - presumably named after the John Kennedy Toole novel - represents a substantial improvement on that debut, which I suppose means it's a serious contender for album of the year. Certainly, while it's the older songs - tracks like "Haiti" and "Rebellion" - that get the biggest applause tonight, the new material has enough instant melodic appeal to surmount the uneasiness that usually greets a set comprised largely of unfamiliar songs.

St John's, the church-turned-concert-hall, is more frequently the venue for string quartets and choral recitals, but proves acoustically solid enough to handle the more testing barrage of an amplified band, whose membership seems to grow each time one looks at the stage. It doesn't help that the musicians are constantly switching instruments around; nor that they all seem to be dressed in various shades of grey, save for Régine Chassagne's pink-mittened fingers.

"Black Mirror" opens the set, as it does the new album, in a miasmic haze of sound. With Chassagne adding hurdy-gurdy to the two violins, the result is not so much a string section as a drone section, providing the woozy undercurrent on which the song floats. It's followed by the album's most obvious single "Keep the Car Running", whose bouncy, jog-along momentum is punctuated here and there by massed choral interjections. Chassagne switches from hurdy-gurdy to accordion for "No Cars Go", to similar droning effect, but providing a more dominant aspect of the melodic hook. As with much of the set, when the song builds to its fullest, fattest sound, it's like riding an avalanche; a solid, unstoppable flow of sound that would shame the most determined of heavy metal bands.

Perhaps the oddest part of the set comes during "Windowsill", a new song in which Win Butler expresses his desire to slough off the chains of expectation and heritage, and carve his own character, a process explained through a list of things he no longer wants to do. Deconsecrated or not, there's a particular frisson in hearing the line, "Don't want to live in my father's house no more" in this particular setting. In its piquant self-contradiction, it seems to sum up the band's unique appeal.

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