It is official: Wilco’s controversial folk album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has gone gold! And what better day to celebrate than when Wilco themselves perform a concert at our very own Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis.

Tuesday night’s performance in the gorgeous jam-packed theater was attended by hordes of college students and almost no one outside of an attractive 18-30 age range. The opening band, Deerhoof, greeted the crowd at 7:30 with an eclectic breed of avant-garde rock. The ten-year-old San Francisco band is deemed “experimental” by critics, and for good reason—the quartet clustered on stage making weird monosyllabic sounds, clamorous guitar noise and static for a good hour, with awesome results!

The lead singer, Satomi Matsuzaki, chants repetitive noises in a sing-song voice that is very clearly marked by her Japanese accent. Paired with hand motions as if she is hailing a plane, the performance is all the more riveting. Where else would you see something like this? She even salutes and does militaristic leg jabs in the air.

The spastic drummer was another highlight of the Deerhoof performance. He went absolutely psycho on his drum set, which he accessed via a seat on the same brand of plastic crate I keep under my bed for shoes. His approach to drumming was epilepsy-inspired and brilliant – he even left his plastic throne a few times to softly shriek into Matsuzaki’s microphone.

Unlike Wilco’s performance, this part of the show was clearly performance-based. From the tics of the guitarists to the plush banana and apple that Matsuzaki used as visual props, the joy of Deerhoof was all in the presentation. Despite the crazy drunk man behind me, who loudly shouted, “They’re weird!” it is indisputable that they were fun to watch.

Once Wilco came on stage, the growing audience was instructed to “stand” and “go wild”, which was manifested in everyone kind of swaying and bobbing to the alt-rock hits off the two most recent albums, A Ghost is Born and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

The lead singer, Jeff Tweedy, showed remarkable charisma and force for his mellow genre of music. He started the set with “Hummingbird” and “Muzzle of Bees”, which were two earlier songs that featured long instrumentals and piercing guitar solos.

During pauses in his dead-pan vocals and acoustic guitar, he took off his sweater and rolled up his sleeves, joking about how Sen. John Edwards did the same in a recent debate.

Then he launched back into the music, highlighting the concert with hits like “Jesus, etc” and “Spiders,” which got people bobbing like hood ornaments.

After a break for Tweedy to change clothes, and a second encore of the rousing “Heavy Metal Drummer,” the crowd dispersed, satisfied with the performance and the shiny new golden status of Wilco’s 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.