Wilco @ The Roundhouse, London

It’s getting on for a decade since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – Wilco’s classic fourth album, famously twice-paid (by Reprise and Nonesuch respectively; both of the house of AOL Tim Warner) – finally reached record stores.

Yet as the discordant piano part of ‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart’ echoes around the Roundhouse, the lampshades hanging from the ceiling flash and flicker like they’re short-circuiting, it sounds as thrilling and as disquieting as ever.

For all the talk that Wilco have largely left such weirdness behind in recent years they throw plenty of curveballs. You could dance to the pounding, driving synths of opener ‘Art of Almost’, which turns into a psychedelic rock jam – it’s a world away from alt.country. Other songs drift away into jams or dissonance, or both. And lyrically, the broken cash machine of the classic ‘Ashes of American Flags’ finds an echo in the broken payphones of bouncy new track ‘Capitol City’.

But short of announcing that tonight’s show would feature the band singing the Chicago phonebook, it’s hard to know what they’d have to do to upset a crowd of committed Wilco fans who aren’t shy of whooping, hollering and acting nothing like the Shepherd’s Bush Empire crowd that sparked Tweedy’s infamous rant in 1997. (He apologises, wryly and with the tone of a man who knows that incident a decade ago will follow him forever, to anyone who was there.)

Tonight, when hush reigns – mostly for the 10 quietly emotional verses of ‘One Sunday Morning…’ – it merely gives space for Tweedy’s gorgeous voice. That may prove a little lengthy to spark a mass sing-along in the way that ‘Jesus, etc’, which is about as country as the evening gets, or ‘A Shot in the Arm’, which closes the encore, does. As he leaves the stage, Tweedy takes his hat off to the crowd, who give him the whole love back.