But a church? That's a different story, the band’s front-man Ira Kaplan admitted toward the end of the band’s recent Louisville stop at The 930 Listening Room—a venue that looks more like music venue where people worship on Sunday than it does the opposite.

The "confession" was one of the few revealing moments in more than two hours of a show billed with the tagline "freewheeling" as a setlist-free storytelling Q&A romp. It followed a simple prompt from an audience member about bizarre cover songs and served as a long-winded introduction to a "God" song by The Kinks, "God’s Children," that's purportedly about a penis transplant.

Known for being comically quick-witted on their feet between songs and never playing the same show twice, the New Jersey-based three-piece managed to play a solid show in spite of an audience seemingly determined to sabotage the format with an endless supply of fanzine-inspired questions.

The local Gannett-owned entertainment rag last week took aim at the band for dodging so many questions and while their responses to queries about the title of their latest album, soundtracks, collaborations with other bands, influences and inspiration were not always handled with grace one has to wonder how a band with two decades-plus of experience is supposed to react to lame questions?

As a zine editor who has asked way more lame questions of bands than I’d care to recount—including a never printed interview with Yo La Tengo bass player James McNew about his project Dump—I identified all too well with some of the responses. It was in some ways as if all of my nightmare moments interviewing bands were suddenly being played out in front of 400-plus people, producing awkward pauses and half-ass responses that only further delayed the music I paid to hear.

Not that all of the questions missed the mark. Some produced humorous anecdotes like one about an angry Dutchman calling Ira a burger eater and another that led to a discussion of "drummer face" and Georgia's apparent skill avoiding it. Even the mundane question about what they were listening to that so ruffled the Velocity Weekly writer's feathers produced unexpectedly fun results (after James said he didn't like music, Ira talked about how he'd recently heard an Animals song he’d never heard before and James name-dropped the Black Flag album "Slip It In" as the last thing he had listened to).

As for the not setlist setlist itself, the straight questions and requests disguised as questions was hard to criticize. In addition to the aforementioned Kinks song, they covered Bob Dylan's "Fourth Time Around," the heartbreakingly beautiful Bert Jansch tune "Needle of Death" and a Lambchop number with the band's frontman Kurt Wagner assisting. That would be Kurt Wagner the parking attendant, guitar tech., mistaken vagrant and opening act whose entrance—stumbling in from the back of the room singing loudly and unpredictably—was one of the more memorable events of the evening. The rest of the set featured a mix of new and old material with a concentration on the "And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out" and "I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One" records.

By the time the encore rolled around and the Q&A session had been put out of its misery, the band had hit its peak and despite the late hour really could of played another solid hour and not made me feel the cushioned seat beneath me taking its toll.

Simply put, I didn't want it to end.