Imagine Dragons have fresh sound, look at Xcel show

After playing six Twin Cities concerts over the course of two years behind their debut album, Imagine Dragons threatened to overstay their welcome even in one of their top markets.

Just the simple fact that the Las Vegas rockers had new songs to play at Xcel Energy Center on Tuesday night felt like an automatic win.

Touring behind their second album, "Smoke and Mirrors," the boyishly earnest Dragons also freshened things up with a new, hi-fi stage production featuring a lot of — you guessed it — smoke and mirror-like visual effects. They brought in an interesting opening act, too: Metric, the Canadian indie-rock band that headlined Rock the Garden 2013 but had yet to be tested in front of a mainstream rock crowd like the Dragons'.

There are certainly a lot of gaga Imagine Dragons fans in the Twin Cities. Tuesday's crowd of nearly 13,000 fans — a few thousand more than at prior stops on the tour, with a lot of teens and families — seemed enraptured the moment frontman Dan Reynolds raised his hands in hello during the opening tune, "Shots," one of the best and liveliest of the new tunes.

Reynolds' hands were over his head in Bono-like fashion pretty much throughout the show, except when it came time to bang the big drums that have become one of the band's signature gimmicks.

The guy is a shameless showman disguised as an affable everyman. He hit the small thrust stage toward the center of the arena to lead a singalong right away in the second tune, "Trouble" — another new one, as repetitive as Sesame Street's "Elmo Song."

He stayed on the small stage to sing Alphaville's "Forever Young" before a sea of lighted cellphones. The 1984 soft-rock hit's hopelessly mushy vibe was carried over into the title track of "Smoke and Mirrors" and another new one, "Summer," for which Reynolds gave the simpleton introduction, "It seems appropriate to play it since it's the start of summer."

In the end, the best moments in Tuesday's 105-minute concert were nothing fans hadn't seen before, including the explosive one-word chorus shout-along in "Radioactive" and the tribal drum workout in "Demons." The new hit, "I Bet My Life," was another rousing highlight, but it came off a lot like a second version of "Radioactive." The one heard ceaselessly over the past two years was enough.

With only 45 minutes and a small patch of the stage to work with, Metric made the most of its opening set but ultimately proved out of place. Not that the quartet lacks the showmanship or musical pizazz to energize an arena.

Frontwoman Emily Haines worked her tail off dancing at the front of the stage and gesturing at fans like a Jon Bon Jovi with less hair spray, and the band was backed by an impressive stage lighting setup like the one it used at Rock the Garden.

The crowd seemed only modestly into Metric, though, with the anthemic "Breathing Underwater" coming closest to winning people over. Haines & Co. picked out some of their heaviest tunes, including "Gold Guns Girls" and the new single "The Shade," which made for a sharp, explosive finale.

All the Metric fans who were equally disinterested in seeing Imagine Dragons on Tuesday can look forward to hearing that one and other new material in concert elsewhere soon.

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658