In their imperial phase, Arcade Fire would recommend fans follow formal dress codes to enhance concerts of snowballing theatricality. For gigs under his own name, multi-instrumentalist member Will Butler – Arcade Fire frontman Win’s energetic younger brother – takes things in a different direction. There’s still plenty of drama, but it emerges from a distinctly more down-home set-up.

Part of that seems to be a no-roadie rule: Butler and his three-piece band efficiently set up their own gear in front of an amused crowd, sporting black sweatshirts personalised with their first names – “Julie”, “Sara”, “Miles” – looking for all the world like the henchmen of an indie-rock-themed villain from the old Adam West Batman TV show. There’s even a flash of builder’s bum as Will lines up his row of guitar stands. After such a laidback preamble, the thunderbolt intensity with which the band rip into their set comes as a genuine shock. Butler skips the usual between-song banter in favour of chaining together as many crashing songs as possible – it’s a propulsive, crazy quilt of trad and alt-rock that constantly seems to teeter on the edge of collapse, if not for his almost demonically committed vocal performance: an infectious, passionate hooting and a-hollering.

There are only eight songs on his recent solo album Policy, but Butler manages to cram more than double that number into a tight hour, including the poised, slinky funk of Anna and songs recorded as a deadline-driven creative experiment for this paper, when he spent a week cranking out oblique, catchy responses to news stories that caught his eye. He’s already declared the influence of Pixies, Talking Heads and Violent Femmes – underlined by a raucous encore that includes the Femmes’ American Music – but seeing Butler in full flight, there’s also a hint of Ryan Adams, another artist with an accelerated workrate and impressive knack for evoking rock’s past.

• At Birmingham Institute, 23 April. Box office: 0121-643 0428. Then touring.