Seeing Bob Mould play to about a thousand people at Irving Plaza on a Wednesday night brought to mind a question: how many people would he be playing for if he re-formed Hüsker Dü (something he has expressed no desire to do)? If that happened, the former Dü guitarist/songwriter would be playing multiple nights at a venue three times this size, some place like the Hammerstein Ballroom, where the re-formed Pixies played eight sold-out shows last December.

The funny thing—which really isn’t funny at all - is that much of what Hüsker Dü fans would look for in a reunion is present in Mould’s latest tour, including a slew of the classics he wrote for that band. No offense to the group’s other driving force, Grant Hart, but Mould’s current band has not just the sound, but also the spirit of the Hüskers.

Mould and his crew delivered a sizable portion of their new album and half of the seminal Copper Blue, originally by Mould’s first post Hüsker band Sugar. The fans in attendance were ecstatic: the thousand or so people in the house actually sounded more like three thousand.

Mould played for an hour and a quarter, with two encores, barely stopping to say anything along the way, and often moving from one song directly into the next. While he tended to group together songs from each phase of his career, he also juxtaposed songs from different eras, demonstrating that his work is as cohesive a Body of Song as his new album’s title suggests.

The band’s playing was lean and focused. Its anchor was the steady Brendan Canty, also known for his work with Fugazi. On keys, star DJ and remixer Rich Morel added some newer-sounding elements to Mould’s songs, playing Steve Nieve to Mould’s Elvis Costello. Bassist Jason Narducy of Verbow, a band Mould has produced, acted as Mould’s foil, standing beside him at the front of the stage and providing ethereal power-pop backing vocals as a counterpoint to Mould’s rumbling howl.

After blasting through a bunch of uptempo Sugar songs and a few new compositions, Mould slowed it down, first with the new song “High Fidelity”, a moving meditation on committed relationships, and then with “Hardly Getting Over It”, the show’s centerpiece. Mysteriously rising out of silence, as it does on record, the song built to crescendo after crescendo, breaking down and building up again. Mould’s words tackled illness, death and despair, topics all too real and all too rarely addressed in popular music. The evening’s best moment: midway through “Hardly Getting Over It” everything dropped away except Narducy’s solid bass line and Mould’s tortured vocals.

On his blog, Mould wrote of this show that it “ended on a high note.” Indeed, after “Hardly Getting Over It”, he blazed through other Hüsker classics, including “Could You Be The One?”, “I Apologize”, “Chartered Trips”, and “Celebrated Summer”. The last third of his performance also included a few more new numbers (“Best Thing”), Sugar songs (“If I Can’t Change Your Mind”), and even some solo material that’s not on the new album (“Egoverride”). The group capped it off with a rollicking, joyful “Makes No Sense at All”, in which Mould thumbs his nose at an aloof, judgmental romantic interest. Near the stage, pogoing abounded.