You should see Wild Flag live. Let’s start with that. If you didn’t make it to One Eyed Jacks on October 26, you were (and are) wrong, and I firmly believe you owe everyone in your life an apology. Wild Flag manages a seemingly effortless blend of technical virtuosity and garage intensity, shredding through unstoppable gems such as “Future Crimes” sporting ear-to-ear grins and busting out old-school arena rock moves. A guitar windmill would not be out of place. It certainly helps to have a drummer as reliably jaw-dropping as Janet Weiss, who ably anchored the more exploratory, jam-y segments of Wednesday’s show, and a front-woman as charismatic as Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein.

The show opened with Eleanor Friedberger playing songs from her solo debut Last Summer. Friedberger is most famous for being the female half of the Fiery Furnaces, but her work under her own name is more traditional folk-rock fare. She consistently draws comparisons to Patti Smith, probably because she dresses like an extra in Almost Famous and her band appeared to be 19-year-olds in competing Tom Petty costumes. That isn’t meant as a slight — her off-kilter, strikingly personal songs worked well, and when she joined Wild Flag onstage for a ramshackle cover of “Beast of Burden,” a good show became a great one.

With the exception of “Glass Tambourine” and “Racehorse,” which were given the long-form, jam treatment live, Wild Flag tore through their debut record with practiced aplomb, and rounded out the set with new material and a couple of worthwhile covers (the previously mentioned “Beast of Burden” and Television’s “See No Evil”). There was a sense of spontaneous joy about the whole thing, with members of both bands joining the other onstage. The audience, which skewed older than most indie rock shows at One Eyed Jacks (Sleater-Kinney fans, one can only assume), was dancing and cheering with the drunken abandon that only a really stellar rock show can provide. This is a strong contender for the best concert I’ve seen in this city in 2011.