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Review: Mumford and Sons take centre ice at Montreal's Bell Centre

There was a very modest amount of arena-rock spectacle at the Bell Centre on Monday, but mostly there was a band clearly intent on preserving the intimacy of their early shows.

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Mumford and Sons are not Def Leppard, so the main motivation behind their current tour’s in-the-round stage couldn’t have been the opportunity for arena-rock spectacle. There was a very modest amount of extravagance at the Bell Centre on Monday, but mostly there was a band clearly intent on preserving the intimacy of their early shows, despite the contrast between the British quartet’s double-digit turnouts in 2008 and the nearly 17,050 who braved the early March bone-chill.

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A lot has changed for Marcus Mumford and his pseudo offspring beyond venue size, with the folk-rock stomp of 2009’s Sigh No More having been expanded (Babel), shunned (Wilder Mind), and reintroduced as part of the textured tapestry of the recent Delta album. Monday’s opener, 42, illustrated the growth in miniature: the core quartet huddled together before an electro undercurrent propelled Mumford to face the crowd as the band’s ranks quietly grew. By the climax, the frontman was walloping a percussion kit while a brass duo expanded the framework.

That earnestness was nicely offset by Mumford’s affability between numbers. “If you have a seat, it doesn’t mean you have to sit in it. F— the person behind you,” he half-joked before Guiding Light balanced jaunty acoustic guitar and a rafter-scaling crescendo.

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But it was a spirited strum through Little Lion Man, the band’s inaugural single, that prompted those in the stands to take Mumford up on his invitation. In superb gravel-mouthwash voice throughout the show, he gave the cathartically profane chorus to the crowd, with Winston Marshall’s banjo at the centre instead of adding colour to the borders. It was as fit for arena consumption as the more conventional and considerably less rousing guitar showcase Tompkins Square Park.

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Accompanied by a deep throb and dry ice, the atypical Woman received a more muted response, even after Mumford made a quick trip off the stage and to the barricades. The staging that facilitated such up-close moments was a blessing and a curse. Not so much a central podium as a nearly wall-to-wall strip cleaving the general-admission floor in two, the long and narrow stage boosted both the number of fans with ace seats and the number with a subpar view. Mumford isn’t a showboat, so he often played to half the room for most of a given song’s duration, leaving Marshall as the only band member fluidly making the rounds. If the intent was to relax the band/fan barrier, nowhere was it more successful than in Ditmas, when Mumford climbed high into the reds and, more daringly, waded through the pit.

A mid-set trio of original-recipe numbers would have worked wonders on any stage. A storm-tossed Holland Road had an addictive ebb and flow, and the bluegrass-coloured Roll Away Your Stone was infectious enough to send Ben Lovett bounding off his piano. Those bookended a tidal singalong on The Cave, the night’s ecstatic zenith: grand and humble, personal and universal, it was the band’s most effortlessly unifying moment.

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The mechanical pulse of Picture You was brave, but primarily functioned as a setup for a rare concession to all-out arena indulgence: as the band tunnelled into the gonzo ambience of Darkness Visible, an extended barrage of fireworks rocketed off a descending lighting rig. It was an aberration, as noteworthy for disrupting the mood as it was for leaving the audience awestruck.

After a main set of just over an hour, the encore began with a pair of zero-frills acoustic songs that should have one-upped those fireworks but ended up being mostly an exercise in futility. As the quartet gathered around a single microphone, Mumford asked for quiet and warned those with a season pass to the beer stand: “If you feel like this is your time to shine, it’s not.” Considering the number of hissed “shut up”s punctuating Cold Arms, the overwhelming majority of the room was on board, but there were enough wolf-whistling idiots to break the spell before it could be cast.

The rudeness led to some unexpected levity when Mumford halted Forever a few lines in, apparently distracted by a critic near the barricades: “What!? ‘I f—ing hate this one’? Well, tough s–t.” It was a good-natured ribbing and he quickly regained composure, as a halo of harmonies finally commanded some blessed silence and then inspired a hushed but compelling choir of thousands.

The celebratory I Will Wait would have been a natural finale, but rather than leave on that proven high note, they challenged and rewarded the crowd with Delta’s slow-building title track, accompanied by a gentle confetti shower. It wasn’t the galvanizing force that brought them here, but the vote of confidence in their present was just as crucial as celebrations of their past.

jzivitz@postmedia.com

twitter.com/jordanzivitz

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