Over many years, the veteran indie rockers of Yo La Tengo have earned a collective reputation as a must-see live act. Simultaneously, by releasing an uninterrupted string of highly acclaimed albums for well nigh 20 years, the Hoboken, N.J.-based trio has built a loyal fan base and achieved a level of respect from critics and listeners alike that few bands can boast. Drawing on a highly varied repertoire of songs during a performance at the Wilbur Theatre last Wednesday night, the members of Yo La Tengo demonstrated a remarkable ability to reconstruct their sound in a live setting, thus proving to the (considerably grizzled) audience that their reputation reflects reality.But before Yo La Tengo took the stage, the opening act, Yura Yura Teikoku, played a rousing set. Clad in form-fitting pants and sporting enormous hairdos, the androgynous three-piece Japanese classic rock outfit clung to its somewhat passé 1970s style to an extent that verged on parody. Regardless of the laughter that such excesses elicited in the audience, the band wowed listeners with excellent guitar playing and catchy songs that followed a familiar structure despite the fact that they were sung in a foreign language. After a rambling one-hour set, the crowd was ready for the esteemed headliner.

Yo La Tengo exhibited characteristic breadth in their performance, playing material from earlier albums such as Painful (1993) and I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One (1997), as well as the band's newest release, the allusively retrospective Popular Songs. From the Motown-inflected "If It's True," which benefited from the temporary addition of a string section to the ensemble, to the shoegazey buildup "More Stars Than There Are in Heaven," the range of songs indicated a remarkable versatility. In addition, the contrasts of style, volume and tone were striking: Several times during the concert, multi-instrumentalist Ira Kaplan played a sizzling, distorted onslaught of guitar notes while flailing his lanky body in a spasmodic effort to conjure a chaotic mess of sound. At other moments, such harsh entropy was completely abandoned in favor of a gentler aesthetic, as on "The Weakest Part," when the virtuosic Kaplan soothed the audience with piano while his spouse and fellow band member Georgia Hubley sang sweetly in her trademark, feather-light voice.

Several songs saw the various poles of sound and tone-loud and soft, melodic and jarring, smooth and distorted-resolved into a cohesive whole in a sort of musical dialectic. For instance, on the crowd-pleasing "Stockholm Syndrome," bassist James McNew sang a bittersweet pop melody over a mellow acoustic guitar and muted drums only to be interrupted midway through by an extremely raucous, off-beat and off-key set of electric guitar shrieks that consciously threatened to rend the neatly ordered song apart. (Indeed, Kaplan played the rest of the song following his solo out of tune, prompting the band to repeat the last verse in a moment befitting a venue that traditionally functions as a comedy club).

Such a synthesis of opposites was most notably achieved on the aforementioned sprawling ballad, "More Stars Than There Are In Heaven." For roughly 15 minutes, the trio harmonized to the lyrics "We'll walk hand in hand" over an unchanging chord progression in a beautiful repeating sequence, while very gradually the sound grew overwhelmed and distorted, devolving to the point of utter chaos in an ugly catharsis reminiscent of The Velvet Underground and Nico. By the end, the piece resolved its tensions into a coherent whole once again as the threatening high-pitch bouts of feedback subsided, leaving in place an endlessly repeating melody that seemed to stretch on forever. The song itself seemed a fitting metaphor for Yo La Tengo, a band that has always pushed itself, sometimes erratically, in various directions over the course of a quarter-century and yet has managed to remain consistently grounded throughout that time.