The band has learned from Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles and Heart how to segue acoustic picking and strumming into electric guitars and tiered vocal harmonies.
"If we live until we're long in the teeth/Think of me and how I used to be," Ms. Hamilton sings in "Ballad of the Golden Hour," which moves from acoustic guitar strumming into a tangle of slide guitars, a distorted psychedelic surge and a final, quiet thought about mortality: "It's all slowing down".
The music started with crisp patterns and strummed its way into overpowering squalls of tremolo.
In "Wintered Debts" whispery acoustic strumming morphs into dazed psychedelia, Queen-like vocal harmonies, a country shuffle and a minimalist haze of piano and voice; that's before the orchestra arrives, quivering and hovering, only to suddenly splice into a postscript like a Beach Boys ballad.
Eventually, for the best stretch of a tense performance, they played together, Mr. Connor's thin notes slicing through Mr. Haino's fat and rough tone clusters until Mr. Haino sang high notes and turned off his guitar completely, but kept strumming, fully into his actions.
Lavish with musicianly details, the songs can linger over vocal harmonies, dart ahead as briskly strummed folk-rock, drift into psychedelic pastorales, build elegant chamber-pop interludes or find a haunted solitude.
It might not be for you if… You don't feel like burrowing into Ryder-Jones' strummed guitar lines and reflective lyrics.
As he strummed his guitar and started into the strains of "Home," hundreds of tiny lights appeared in the audience, as people whipped out their iPhones and began to record the performance.
Staying true to their namesake and raising the energy level, wild man drummer Nicholas Shuminsky pounded the first amp-shaking bass drum hit and guitarists Scott Wells and Geoff Bucknum strummed out crisp, loud chords into the eager crowd.
