Wilco @ Albert Hall, Manchester, 18 Nov

There aren't many bands who own their back catalogue like Wilco. Where other acts might spurn their earliest releases, Wilco retrieve theirs like parts of sunken treasure, holding them up to the light. Where it might be wise to use your flagship titles sparingly, Wilco tag-team I Am Trying to Break Your Heart and Art of Almost into one 15-minute frontloading of aural information.

And who would have thought, on the release in 2004 of A Ghost Is Born – an album greeted at the time as experimental and difficult – that its ten-minute krautrock smeltdown Spiders (Kidsmoke) would one day become a singalong set-ender, fists in the air to every punch of the riff?

The thing is that, 20 years into their time together, Jeff Tweedy's band have attained such dialogue with their canon that everything can be retold. The oblique can be made lucid, the anthemic obscure. The thrill in their music has always come from the frisson between the song and the tide of noise behind it that threatens to crash and break at any point. Tonight, they turn that interference up: engulfing Via Chicago in a cacophony of scrambled signals, and withholding the defiant coda of Misunderstood. After a year in the wider world of communication breakdown, stalled progress and shocks to the system, it feels appropriate. Single, erratic bolts of strobe finish the effect.

So while there are plenty of moments that spotlight Tweedy's concision – lines like “The ashtray says  / You were up all night” still startle – tonight is largely a reminder that, with Wilco, it's really the sounds that speak. This is partly down to the almost semiotic styles of guitarist Nels Cline and percussionist Glenn Kotche, surely two of the world's finest players in their respective schools, and partly the prominence of songs from 1999's Summerteeth, the first album to introduce these kinds of textural arguments into Wilco's sound before Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – which also gets a good airing tonight – mastered the language.

It's a set list that proves Wilco are not, and never really have been, 'just' a country-rock band, but it's also delivered with real ebullience. On the penultimate night of a six-month tour and about to return to a changed America (as support artist William Tyler says of his song We Can't Go Home Again, it's taken on something of a new meaning), it seems Wilco are squeezing out every last drop.