The critical buzz around Wilco’s latest, self-titled album has centered on the notion of identity. Some have heralded Wilco (the album) as a reclamation of the insouciance of the band’s early albums, while others—particularly City Paper’s own Aaron Leitko—have described it as a tour of the band’s sonic arc over the last decade. But aside the reflexivism of its latest studio release, Wilco at Wolf Trap on Wednesday reiterated what might be the band’s most enduring legacy: its ability to put on one hell of a live show.

Conor Oberst and his new entourage, the Mystic Valley Band, opened to a disappointingly sparse early-evening crowd. Perhaps the Wilco faithful hadn’t gotten the memo on Bright Eyes’s recent identity-tweaking, which has resulted in two wonderful forays into Americana, including a self-titled album of his own. Oberst hasn’t quite mastered the down-home look—he wore skinny jeans rolled to the shins above clunky loafers, along with boxy, unnecessary shades—but his lyrics were rife with roots symbology (religion, boardwalk romances, The Road, etc.), and the warmth of Mystic Valley’s jouncing chord progressions proved an unexpectedly nice vehicle for Oberst’s hoarse, often aharmonic voice. Barnburners such as “NYC–Gone, Gone,” “Moab,” and “I Don’t Wanna Die (in the Hospital)”—which seemed more suited to a sweaty juke joint—were lost on the thin, seated, pre-Wilco audience. Shame.

After entering to the theme from "The Price is Right," Wilco opened with “Wilco (the song),” the opening/title track from the new record. Whether the album is a mission statement or a cliff notes on the band’s evolution, the song exemplifies the band’s introspective turn. The lyrics play like an infomercial: “Do you dabble in depression? / Is someone twisting a knife in your back? /Are you being attacked? / Oh, this is a fact / that you need to know /… Wilco’ll love you, baby.”

There was a lot of love in the building. A group of fans near the stage at one point stood on their seats to reveal lettered tee shirts reading “Wilco (the fans),” prompting frontman Jeff Tweedy to observe, “this parenthetical thing has really gotten out of control.” [Indeed: The venue’s souvenir kiosk featured a host of meta-merchandise, including “Wilco (the tote bag).”] The notoriously prickly Tweedy, his babyface framed by a mess of a graying, scarecrow-like hair, was in jovial spirits as well: He indulged hardcore fans with “the most requested song in the history of our Web site”—a tune called “How to Fight Loneliness,” from 1999’s Summerteeth. To the subsequent applause, Tweedy quipped: “That sounds like 36 people…” He even let The Luckiest Fan in the World—some dude wearing a blue polo in the front row—strum his solo on “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” while he knelt at the edge of the stage and worked the frets.

Guitar solos, particularly those perpetrated by freakout artist Nels Cline, were the order of the night. The set list primarily featured those songs from the Wilco oeuvre that melt from easy-riding singalongs into lengthy, facemelting noise tantrums—notably Sky Blue Sky’s “Impossible Germany,” in which Cline collapsed about like a string-joint doll while Tweedy and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone harmonized on the Allman Brothers-esque backing arpeggios, and A Ghost is Born’s “Handshake Drugs,” in which Cline, Tweedy, and Sansone collaborated on a dissonant shredding sesh while John Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche, and synther Mikael Jorgensen held together the basis groove.

These moments of still-catchy chaos were often punctuated by dramatic use of the stage lights, which would backlight the band as silhouettes against a single row of moonlike bulbs, smoldering like a landing spacecraft or a convoy of semi trucks. In one memorable instance, the lights went blinding white, illuminating Wilco in a gods-of-rock tableau centered by Kotche poised atop his drums, head thrown back, arms akimbo. Kotche then threw himself back down into his throne with a cymbal crash and launched the band into a rollicking rendition of “I’m The Man Who Loves You.” Ah, yes: love.

“The last time we played here was nine years ago,” Tweedy said at one point. “We were opening for Natalie Merchant.” Wilco’s stage charisma does well to mask the fact that the band is old enough to step back from itself far enough to make an “identity” album. But while the group’s discography is complex and variegated enough to stimulate bookish theses in critical circles, the experience of seeing Wilco perform live is a purely visceral one.

[To read Leitko’s insightful album review, click here. To see more of Brandon Wu’s photos from the show, click here. For post-show chatter on the Wilco forum Via Chicago, click here. For a sampling Wednesday's easy-grooving/face-meltification, see the embed below (more videos from the concert here).]

While the highlight of Sunday's Bang on a Can Marathon at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center came early, the rest of the program offered plenty to enjoy as well, even if the culminating performance was somewhat dubious. Just after the Bang on a Can All-Stars completed their innovative arrangement of Brian Eno's Music For Airports, a rather more scattershot program called kicked off in CSPAC's Gildenhorn Recital Hall, in which members of the Bay Players Experimental Music Collective and the University of Maryland Percussion Ensemble played a series of short pieces for small ensembles. Finally, a 6pm event featuring Glenn Kotche and Terry Riley closed things out.

My impressions of the day, after the jump.

Of the Gildenhorn performances, my favorites were two solo pieces. Robert Black performed a solo upright bass piece in which he managed to play beautiful, fractured melodies while simultaneously bowing a hypnotic drone. Halfway through, some moments of straightforward drama crept in, but I frankly enjoyed a few bars of what could glibly de described as Apocalyptica-style bombast underpinned by that ever-present drone. The other highlight was a solo clarinet performance by Bang on a Can member Evan Ziporyn (pictured above) that he introduced by saying, "I had this crazy idea to play chords on a bass clarinet..." which he appeared to do by singing into his instrument while overblowing. Far from a crass demonstration of extended technique, Ziporyn made his unusual sound into something strange and alluring.

Most of the small-ensemble Gildenhorn pieces deconstructed the relationship between composition and improvisation, the role of the performance space, the role of the performers' physical presences, and so on. Some of these were more interesting in theory than in practice, of course, but Michael Boyd's "Hand Leg Suit" was an entertaining highlight in which the three performers (including Boyd himself) played a kind of musical Twister. The score for this piece had the performers following "simple graphic images and charts that list actions, parts of body and parts of the instrument," the result of which was a fragmented clattering of sounds interspersed with what came off as physical comedy: Boyd hiding underneath the piano saying "this is really weird"; the percussionist taking his drum apart and obsessive-compulsively arranging the pieces along the front of the stage; Boyd meandering out into the crowd and greeting bemused audience members; lots of performing on hands and knees or wandering aimlessly across the stage.

The main event, which was ticketed and kicked off at 6pm in the CSPAC's 1,100-seat Dekelboum Theatre, began with Glenn Kotche performing solo. He started with a piece familiar to anyone who saw him and Nels Cline at the Black Cat in 2006 (when they played solo sets, then together as a duo, opening for Lambchop – a weird bill if there ever was one), "Monkey Chant" off of his 2006 album Mobile. This piece mixes rock-and-roll drum solo bombast with judiciously applied extended techniques, backgrounded by the amplified chirping of live crickets. As at the Black Cat, Kotche actually had an array of small boxes on stage with crickets inside them, which he opened at the beginning of the piece and then closed, one by one, at the end, their sound fading out gracefully.

A pair of duet interpretations of Steve Reich pieces, with Bang on a Can All-Stars percussionist David Cossin, followed, and then the full All-Stars lineup came out and performed what were the most enjoyable pieces of the evening for me: a relatively new commissioned piece called "Snap," and a rearrangement of the titular composition from Mobile for the full ensemble. These were energetic, engaging pieces, very well-received by the crowd, and Kotche once again showed himself to be much more than just "the drummer from Wilco."

After a brief intermission, Terry Riley's "Autodreamographical Tales/Science Fiction" capped off the marathon. A radio station commissioned Riley to write down his dreams and set them to music, and as one might expect, the results are trippy, psychedelic, a pleasant journey through a surreal landscape. Riley recited frank descriptions of his dreams as the Bang on a Can All-Stars flitted easily between styles (here a psych-rock guitar riff, there a a bit of raga; here a few moments of electronic haze, there an energetic, boppy jazz passage). The pastiche of musical styles was entertaining and evocative; unfortunately, I could have done with less of (or even none of) Riley's storytelling. While mostly narrating, he occasionally sang, and his earnest voice took all subtlety out of the performance, especially when singing lines like "Cannabis is a wonderful drug/Sometimes you're like a cat on a rug." Not exactly poetry at its finest.

"Autodreamographical Tales" received polite applause and a general feeling of bewilderment, which I suppose was probably the point. Still, I couldn't help but feel a little let down by Riley's piece. Thankfully, all the great stuff earlier in the day more than made up for any disappointment I felt at the conclusion.

See more photos of the afternoon's events here.

For the past few years, the annual Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City has had my mouth watering, juxtaposing performances of fascinating and often under-performed avant-garde classical music with shows by cutting-edge popular music performers (and generally blurring the line between these two categories). Last year's festival, for instance, featured compositions by Harrison Birtwistle and Terry Riley alongside performances by Marnie Stern and Dan Deacon.

This Sunday, the D.C. area is in for a treat as a scaled-down version of the festival occupies the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center for an afternoon and evening (from 2pm until about 9pm). A free performance of Brian Eno's famed Music For Airports is among the attractions, along with performances of compositions by Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche (some of which D.C. concertgoers may have seen when Kotche performed a solo set at the Black Cat back in 2006). A lengthy Terry Riley piece, with Riley himself on vocals and piano, closes out the event.

The first part of the event, from 2pm-6pm, is free; the concert beginning at 6pm is $35. Check out the full schedule of performances here.

Also of note: on Saturday evening, the D.C. Society of Art Rockers hosts renowned electric bassist Michael Manring for a solo show at Jammin' Java. Manring was long the in-house bassist for new-age label Windham Hill, but don't let that fool you, as he's also recorded with jazz luminaries like Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith and even heavy/technical metal musicians like Alex Skolnick (Testament) and Ron Jarzombek (Watchtower). This show celebrates the release of Manring's latest solo album, Soliloquy, and starts at 7pm.