Wild Flag explores fresh terrain in Philadelphia

It took only minutes after the existence of Wild Flag was announced for the quartet - Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, Rebecca Cole of the Minders, and indie-rock fixture Mary Timony - to be dubbed a supergroup.

But at Union Transfer on Wednesday night, they seemed more like four friends bashing out songs in a garage, with the crowd peering in eagerly through an open window.

In recent years, Brownstein and Timony had both drifted away from music, but they returned with their batteries recharged and their palates cleansed. What's most impressive about Wild Flag's self-titled debut album is how little noise the group's four musicians and singers make at times; they're not just thinking about what to play, but whether. At Union Transfer, they underlined their command of negative space and stop-start tempos with a version of Television's "See No Evil," a fiendishly difficult song whose winding melodies poured forth without a hitch.

A considerable percentage of the evening's songs were devoted to the act of making, and being devoted to, music.

On "Romance," Brownstein called it both the subject and the substance of love: "Sound is the blood between me and you." She and Timony seemed an odd pairing at first, the sharp-tongued punk and the mystic prog-rocker, but in Wild Flag, they've found common ground while pushing, or perhaps pulling, each other into fresh terrain.

On "Boom," Brownstein's vocals exuded a frank sensuality alien to Sleater-Kinney's more politicized climate, while Timony seemed to relish stepping out of the solo artist's spotlight, exuding a newfound playfulness. As "Glass Tambourine" stretched out into a gauzy psychedelic workout, she held her reverberating guitar up to her head like a lopsided antenna, a rock-star gesture executed without a trace of self-aggrandizement.

At times, the giddiness of liberation might have led the band astray.

"Racehorse" stretched into a nigh-endless jam, grinding to a halt and starting up again and again, with only Weiss' rock-steady drums to (barely) hold it together.

But for most of the night, Wild Flag displayed an awe-inspiring ability to constantly shift the center of a song without losing its place, passing it from one member to the next like a whispered secret.