Kevin Bronson on March 3rd, 2019

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Bob Mould still plays guitar like a kid who just figured out you could plug the thing into an amp. He bounds around the stage with holy-shit glee, as if daring somebody to tell him to turn down his unholy racket, and eluding anyone who’d try to unplug him.

All around the stage the flannel-shirted Mould cavorted Friday night at the sold-out Teragram Ballroom, returning to the microphone here and there to deliver a screed or an assurance or a poem in the way of a song from his four-decade catalog of punk missiles. Over an hour and a half, he worked both himself and everybody inside the steamy Teragram into a lather, giving a physical performance to a largely middle-aged audience whose idea of exertion these days might be to get off the couch to go to a Bob Mould concert (and forget their earplugs in doing so).

Mould, on a tour celebrating 40 years covering his work in Hüsker Dü in the 1980s, Sugar in the ’90s and the voluminous solo albums that followed, had said last month he was typically not given to dwelling on the past. But Friday night, nostalgia was served (eight Hüsker Dü songs, after all) and college days were re-lived. More importantly and ever so subtly, though, the dots of his important story were connected, from rough-edged beginnings in the Twin Cities with Grant Hart and Greg Norton in Hüsker Dü to his embrace of melody with Sugar to his continually surprising solo work.

The past 11 years have seen Mould, 58, release six albums that any twentysomething rocker would kill for. The latest, “Sunshine Rock,” is a shockingly (considering the times) optimistic record that Mould dispatched from his new home base of Berlin.

His 26-song set touched on his new perspective. “I’ll reach into the sky / grab the nearest shooting star,” he sang on the title track, while letting “I Fought” be a celebration of battles won, or at least survived, and letting “The Final Years” speak to an uneasy truce with anger. Yet in the same set, fans got “Sunshine” along with 1984 doses of vitriol “Never Talking to You Again” (penned by Hart) and “Something I Learned Today.”

More than a few heads bobbed inside the Teragram when Mould performed Hüsker Dü’s second single, 1982’s “In a Free Land.” Talk about prescience: “Why bother spending time / Reading up on things / Everybody’s an authority / In a free land.”

As Mould has been in recent years, he was backed by bassist-vocalist Jason Narducy (Verbow) and Jon Wurster (Superchunk), a thunderstorm of a rhythm section that matches the frontman’s youthful abandon.

And speaking of youthful, the show was opened by Criminal Hygiene [see the Buzz Bands LA interview], who were celebrating Friday’s release of the album “Run It Again.” With a sound reminiscent of ’80s Minneapolis, the quartet could hardly have been a more perfect fit.

Bob Mould setlist: The War, A Good Idea, I Apologize (Hüsker Dü), Hoover Dam (Sugar), Stand Guard, See a Little Light, Sunny Love Song, I Don’t Know You Anymore, The Descent, Thirty Dozen Roses, The Final Years, Sinners and Their Repentances, In a Free Land (Hüsker Dü), Sunshine Rock, Hey Mr. Grey, If I Can’t Change Your Mind (Sugar), I Fought, Sin King, Lost Faith, Celebrated Summer (Hüsker Dü), Something I Learned Today (Hüsker Dü), Chartered Trips (Hüsker Dü), New Day Rising (Hüsker Dü). Encore: Never Talking to You Again (Hüsker Dü), Love Is All Around (Sonny Curtis cover). Flip Your Wig (Hüsker Dü)

Photos by Zane Roessell