BY JENNIFER KELLY

"In 1985, I went to see Hüsker Dü at Maxwell's," says Chris Brokaw, on a break from his acoustic set. "And about eight years later, I was playing in a band called Come and Bob was playing in Sugar, and we toured together and hit it off." Since then Brokaw and Mould have played together intermittently, hitting Northampton last six years ago on Halloween, but it hasn't gotten old for Brokaw. "It is still a genuine thrill to play shows with Bob."

You never know who Brokaw's going to show up playing with. Last time I saw him, he was playing guitar in Thurston Moore's Psychic Hearts, before that drums in the New Year, and before that guitar again in Clint Conley's Consonant.  He also sat in with Rhys Chatham's guitar orchestra, swatted flies with the Baseball Project, played lead for Steve Wynn and, of course, before all that, did time with groundbreaking 1990s bands like Come and Codeine. When I ask him what he's been up to lately, a collaboration with Geoff Farina (ex of Karate) comes up, as well as a joint recording session for the Dirt Music and Tamikrest from Mali, who Brokaw met during the 2008 Festival in the Desert. He's also just starting to piece together another solo album, the first since wonderful, criminally overlooked Incredible Love. He's got a couple of tracks on tape with members of Tortoise. He drops this so quietly into the conversation that I don't really process it until he's already talking about something else.   

Brokaw's set, like Brokaw, is low-key and unassumingly excellent, criss-crossed with references to other bands and other projects. When I arrive, a little late, he's midway into a caustic song I don't recognize, something about "Danny Barracho, ugly and macho." Brokaw is playing by himself, seated, with a plugged in acoustic guitar, and not making any obvious concessions to showmanship beyond a little rhythmic rocking. Even so, there's something very rock about the aggression with which he strums, the hoarse intensity of his voice. You can hear a little bit of a band in the way he plays guitar, the ghost of a bass player rising up through the lower notes, a shadow of a drummer coming through in the way he pounds out his chords. There's also a real writer at work, alongside the journeyman rocker, who can slip casual references to the Hapsburg Empire into his songs, or drop an incandescent aside like "Sleep is a pearl at the bottom of the bay" into "BKO," a Dirt Music song.

People are assholes. People are talking right through his set. I hear a woman screeching something about her mother and her job during Brokaw's beautifully wry break-up song, "My Idea" and almost miss the final wrenching ending of "Xs for Eyes," because of uncontainable laughter from one of the tables right up near the front.  Brokaw appears not to notice, just bringing out one beautifully played, carefully conceived song after another - "Stagger Lee" from his latest pre-war Blues collaboration with Geoff Farina, the melancholy "Mexican Moon" from Incredible Love, a medium-length acoustic guitar instrumental.

Then it's Mould's turn, like Brokaw on his own and accompanied only by guitar, first an acoustic, then two electrics, one dedicated solely to the "punk rock stuff" at the end of his set.    

Mould starts with "Wishing Well," from his first solo album Workbook, a song that, like much of the acoustic set, has a really lovely, lilting folk melody, though it is pushed well past the edge of folk by Mould's aggressive, scrubby guitar playing and high volume, rock-oriented vocal delivery. "Here Me Calling," off Black Sheets of Rain, is likewise a volatile mix of modality and brashness, its fluttery folk flourishes bristling with yowls and shouts. You begin, during this section of the show, to understand why it made perfect sense for Mould to collaborate with Richard Thompson once, and later, during the rock part, why Dave Grohl might call him in for a session.

Sugar's Copper Blue is probably my favorite part of the post-Hüsker catalog, and Mould hits it pretty hard, starting with anthemic "Hoover Dam," its big chorus ("Standing on the edge of Hoover Dam") swirling in an almost Celtic way over fractious, frantic strumming. You have to check to make sure that Mould is still holding an acoustic guitar, because it is pretty intense and pretty loud and pretty rocking even so.

Once Mould has revisited "See a Little Light" and "No Reservations," and, indeed, the whole first section of the show without much chatter, he pauses to begin a running thread about naked men, coffee and liberal politics. He lets us know that, if we noticed a fumble during the previous song (I didn't), it was because he'd had a random image of two coffee-drinking companions stark naked on some sort of a "daddy calendar". He's clearly comfortable playing gay-friendly Northampton and has, in fact, spent the afternoon playing at the farmers' market. This leads, somehow, to a story about a guy at Mould's gym in San Francisco's Castro district, who lifts in a skimpy wrestling singlet, but strips completely naked when he goes outside after the workout. "And this is sort of okay in the Castro," he says wonderingly, clearly cheered by the idea. He goes on to describe how the naked man stopped at a Starbucks, where the health code prohibits nudity and pulled a sarong out of his bag, wound it on, and went in for coffee. Mug in hand, outside, the sarong came off again.

He tells this story, and a related series of anecdotes about nakedness in and around a string of songs that includes "Hardly Getting Over It," "Thumbtack," "Sinners and their Repentances," still acoustic, but still aggressive. The songs, from all phases of his solo career, are a fascinating mix of hard and soft, their melodies jutting out aggressively, then curling into soft, accessible shapes. Mould hammers at his guitar, like Brokaw, eliciting a band-like degree of friction and forward motion from his instrument, and seems always to be funneling more intensity into his singing than the notes will take. He breaks off into little yelps and roars and "na na na"s, as if the melody, however, pretty, is just a starting place, and even the slower songs seem to slope forward into the next phrase - as if they'd really like to go faster.

Mould isn't really touring a new album, but he's got a biography all finished and due to be published via Little, Brown next summer. "It's my top 100 stories, all edited and strung together," he announces with a grin, "except for the new ones that I'm telling tonight." Someone asks him who will read the audio book, and Mould says that he hasn't thought about it. "Maybe I'll sing it," he adds, "Kind of a recitato." And with that, fittingly enough, he launches into "Life and Times," the first song in the electrified portion of the program.

There's a strong thread of connection between all three parts of the program. Mould plays the electric essentially the same way he played the acoustic, attacking sharply, strumming hard, yet with the electric, you notice a beautiful shimmer hanging over the notes. His voice, too, which sounded a little pushed over just acoustic, seems just right now, not too loud, not too soft. "The Breach" follows "Life and Times," with Mould tracing its melody up the scale in shadowy half intervals and ruefully observing superheroes' scorn and human fallibility. The next one is "I'm Sorry Baby You Can't Stand in My Light Anymore," and there's a brief detour to talk about Mould's recent sessions for the new Foo Fighters album. He plays just a little of it, pulling back, he says, because, "I think it might make Dave mad." Then it's back to Copper Blue for "Your Favorite Thing" and "The Act, The Act."

The "punk" part of the evening is underway now, with Mould picking up the tempo and scrabbling away at yet another guitar. He's 50 now, and like much of the audience, showing it, and yet it is pretty clearly the height of the evening when he dusts off Hüsker Dü's "Celebrate Summertime," at the close of the regular set, or Sugar's "If I Can't Change Your Mind," and Hüsker Dü's "Makes No Sense at All" for the encore. Now you can hear how Mould always slipped deceptively catchy melodies into even the most head-banging of his punk anthems, and how punk aggression could turn tuneful, even in the confusion of the mosh pit.

No one is moshing tonight - it's a sit-down early show and about as civilized as dinner theater. But Mould looks like he could still thrash out a roughhousing soundtrack for it, even one you could hum to yourself on the way home.