"We’d like to make this place a club," said Jeff Tweedy rather sheepishly about a third of the way through his band’s two-hour set last Friday night, as though he were slightly embarrassed to be playing in the pristine Wang Theatre, just one of the many posh venues at which Wilco will be appearing over the next two months. He added, "We’ve been playing a lot of dumps like this on this tour." A fan spoke for many of us in the sold-out house when he yelled something about wanting alcohol, something we weren’t allowed to bring in from the lobby.

But the biggest problem with this otherwise arresting show was a noticeable lack of volume that prevented some of the more clamorous moments from hitting as hard as they should have. Despite that — and the fact that, no, this wasn’t a club — the Wang was actually rather idyllic. The theater’s visual æsthetics in combination with the rhythmic video montage (cityscapes, underwater imagery, fireworks, etc.) displayed behind the band heightened the beauty of the songs, the sound was crystalline and warm, and you could have heard a pin drop during the quietest moments, as in between vocal phrases during the delicate opening of "At Least That’s What You Said." Wilco played all but two of the songs on their acclaimed new A Ghost Is Born and a good handful from 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (both on Nonesuch) and 1999’s Summerteeth (Warner Bros.). As the six-piece band alternately produced a cacophonous sonic wall and reduced it to a hush, their capacity to aggrandize Tweedy’s deceptively simple songs was more apparent than it is on record.

Following "California Stars," from 1998’s Mermaid Avenue (Elektra), an album of Woody Guthrie lyrics set to music by Wilco and Billy Bragg, Tweedy said, "It would be irresponsible of Wilco to not remind you to vote." He was about to leave it at that, but then the man who had just sung lyrics written by America’s most important political folk singer felt compelled to take his responsibility one step farther and say that he didn’t think voting for George Bush was an "all right" thing to do. No surprise that a crowd that had earlier cheered after Tweedy sang the closing line of "Ashes of American Flags" ("I would like to salute the ashes of American flags/And all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags") was loud in its agreement.