BY ROXANA HADADI / PHOTOS BY ADAM FRIED

To say that The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle is probably one of the hardest-working men in indie rock wouldn't be an overstatement. After all, he's written and released hundreds of songs; tours incessantly (this was his third time in Washington in as many different venues in the past year); and constantly gets together with fellow musicians for little side projects, such as The Congress (with Mark Givens), The Seneca Twins (with wife Lalitree and Chris Butler) and The Comedians (with fellow rocker John Vanderslice). If there's anyone who deserves indie-cred overtime pay, it's Darnielle.

And with Vanderslice accompanying him on their all-acoustic Gone Primitive tour, Darnielle descended upon Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington as a man on a mission: Play as many live staples and crowd requests as possible, just as long as they didn't do anything to offend their religious-minded venue.

"I do not want to play ‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton' in a synagogue," Darnielle said after numerous fans screamed out the song's title during his encore. And though Darnielle admitted to having "played it in a church with great glee," the song's chorus of "Hail Satan!" wasn't really something the singer-songwriter was too comfortable with performing, he said.

But that didn't mean Darnielle's intricate, intense, depressing-yet-inspiring slices of life were all off-limits: "What does that leave us with?" the singer-songwriter rhetorically asked the audience after explaining why "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" wasn't on his setlist. "More exciting songs about child abuse!"

First things first, though. Before Darnielle whipped the sold-out crowd into a sing-a-long frenzy with tales of hard-knock lives, it was Vanderslice who amused them, describing how he and Darnielle got "hyped-up listening to Brokencyde (an abysmal pop-punk outfit with a "T-Pain vocoder" and a "death metal guy that screams along ... that's their hook);" explaining his reaction to Mountain Goats' bassist Peter Hughes sending him a YouTube video of a guy drinking a soda ("It was way more disturbing than if it had been, like, disturbing"); and criticizing his friends' encouragement that he floss regularly ("Where's the heroin, dude? Isn't this fucking rock ‘n' roll? I drink, like, three times a year and now I feel like a rebel because I'm not flossing"). Good stuff.

Aside from providing the crowd with steady laughs, though, Vanderslice also wowed with his own guitar-playing and songwriting prowess, playing songs such as the whispery-thin "My Old Flame" and "Numbered Lithograph," fan favorites "Pale Horse" and "Me and My 424" (though the crowd didn't seem too familiar with Vanderslice, there were some murmurings and mouthing of lyrics throughout the crowd during those two), the impassioned "Trance Manual" and "Nikki Oh Nikki" (a sort of revenge song from the point-of-view of a jilted boyfriend, which Darnielle wrote the lyrics to, according to Vanderslice) and new tracks "Scorpio Rising" and "Too Much Time," the latter from his upcoming album Romanian Names.

And after Vanderslice's 40 minutes were up, it was Darnielle's turn - though flying solo, he still greeted the crowd with his customary, always-enthusiastic "Hi, we're The Mountain Goats!" before launching into his set. Darnielle readily admitted that "most of these songs, they're not on ... well, they're old," and he wasn't lying: Though the majority of the crowd recognized a couple of songs - such as favorites "No Children," "This Year" and "Dance Music" - most of his set went by randomly, jumping from album to album. There was "Island Garden Song" from 2000's The Coroner's Gambit, "The Day the Aliens Came" from the vinyl-only release of 2005's The Sunset Tree, "Going to Mexico" from 1992's The Hound Chronicles, "Cobscook Bay" from 2000's Isopanisad Radio Hour ... and you get the idea.

After all, Mountain Goats shows are always a grab-bag, and for those fans who are used to it, it's all about hoping Darnielle will end up playing that one song just for you. And for fans that enjoy songs about cannibalistic government employees who go crazy on the moon, rejoice! Darnielle does that, too.

It was that moment that was the night's best, when Darnielle was joined onstage by Vanderslice so they could perform a song together about "the concept of organ-harvesting on the moon." Though Vanderslice had performed the song (which neither of them mentioned the name of, but is one the duo has written together as The Comedians), during his own set once the crowd asked him to play a song he'd never played live before, he came out to play it again with Darnielle. To the highly gleeful crowd, Darnielle would describe his character's actions as such: A man splits his time between his home in Colorado and the moon, where he works for the government harvesting organs "and he starts to get a little cabin fever, sort of ... he starts eating the people who are his charges, and I can't defend his actions, I can only describe them sympathetically."

Then came a typically bizarre, vividly hilarious tale about "how no one's gonna come/ and no one's gonna know/ sleeping bodies hide/ sweet things inside," as Darnielle and Vanderslice exhibited the kind of chemistry that only best friends and collaborating musicians can have. And while Darnielle admitted the song's concept is "a little sad, but the sadness is tempered by his cannibalism," it was that performance that served as a microcosm for the whole night: A beaming, grinning-with-joy Darnielle freaking out on his guitar, screaming absurd lyrics about loneliness, isolation and chomping on organs, while Vanderslice hung back, understated but engaging, a smirk playing on the corners of his mouth as he watched his friend flip out while doing what he does best. Bravo, sirs.