KEY POINTS:
Who would have guessed Easter could be such a religious experience? This one turned out a multi-denominational celebration for the rock faithful across the nation. There was the heavy metal panto of Ozzy, Alice and Kiss causing a facepaint shortage in Wellington; Resurrection of the Smashing Pumpkins in
Auckland; the beginning of Split Enz's second - well, fifth or six actually - coming in Christchurch. And a celebration of some Old Testament values at the first Bluesfest NZ in Whitianga.
Which brings us to Wilco, playing their first headline NZ show after being odd men out at the Bluesfest the night before and an earlier Big Day Out appearance.
The Chicago-based quintet now occupy the position that R.E.M. once did in the church of American alt-rock. They have been music industry martyrs too; their biggest album to date, 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, became a success after it was rejected by its major label backers.
And as a near-sellout crowd witnessed in Takapuna, the band who formed 14 years ago around frontman Jeff Tweedy and have since gone through various line-ups have upgraded themselves into a truly formidable live outfit.
Tweedy's voice may be the understated melancholic centre of Wilco's songs but it's the band's lateral-minded approach to their delivery that made this performance something strangely wondrous.
They may have been pegged as alt-country in the beginning while Tweedy sported a stetson and guitarist Nels Cline had some deft slide guitar in his very deep box of fretboard tricks, but for every song that started with a bootcut-friendly simple strum and Tweedy's plaintive voice, there was an equivalent tangential leap, whether into avant-garde cacophony, electrifying guitar excursions or multilayered rhythms of unconventional angle.
Sometimes on songs like Radio Cure you got all three with a side helping of xylophone. Or on the epic Spiders (Kidsmoke) - which arrived during the deserved multiple encores - Wilco became a pulsing, jagged machine which seemed to have sprung more from a German factory than the American heartland.
But their set, some of it drawn by fan requests posted to their website, balanced tracks from earlier albums with a core of tracks from last year's Sky Blue Sky. Which meant that while sometimes Wilco sounded like a band pulling their songs apart in intriguing ways, they also played a few of them straight and heartfelt.
That was whether it was the jaunty California Stars off Mermaid Avenue, their album with Billy Bragg, or the tender On and On and On towards the end.
And when he wasn't delivering another heartbroken lyric or adding to all that guitar voltage, Tweedy endeared himself with his between-song chats, promising he would pander to us about the nice place we live throughout the evening and delivering on that pledge in hilariously self-aware style.
As for the music, Tweedy and his great band may have been preaching to the converted, but their performance answered all our prayers, and then some.
