“We have a strict one drum machine per set regiment,” Ira Kaplan joked halfway through the acoustic side of Yo La Tengo’s show last Friday at the 9:30 Club. That apparently was why “Ohm,” the opening track on the band’s 13th studio album, Fade, began the concert not as the rat-a-tat earworm it is at home, but as a dreamy, ponderous stream that emanated from the prop trees standing behind Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew.

It’s only mid-February, but Fade clinched my “Best Album of 2013” title a month ago, and for good measure. Though it’s one of Yo La Tengo’s briefest LPs, it’s one of their most expansive, with sonic swells sometimes masking deeply heartbreaking lyrics. But stripped away from John McEntire’s album production, tracks like “Two Trains,” “The Point of It,” and “Cornelia and Jane” were raw, sleepy, but never sleep-inducing. It was Yo La Tengo’s version of a slow dance.

And then they went electric. “Stupid Things,” off Fade, and “We’re an American Band,” from I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, were as gauzy as ever. But the show truly unleashed when Yo La Tengo started mining Electr-O-Pura. The way Kaplan writhed around during “False Alarm,” stretched well beyond its five-and-a-half minute album runtime, one would not expect that he is 56 years old. With McNew and Hubley not letting up from their stations, Kaplan, like a horny teenager who just discovered minor chords, thrashed between mashing keyboards and strangling the neck of his guitar while lurching across the stage.

An electric reprise of “Ohm”—shows on this tour have included unwired and plugged-in versions—four songs later started the come-down, but of course, this being a Yo La Tengo show, there were covers to be had. McNew joined Hubley at the drum kit for a spacier take on Sun Ra’s already outta-this-world “Nuclear War.”

“It’s a motherfucker, don’t you know?”

Maybe, but not enough to overcome this band.