POP MUSIC REVIEW : NRBQ: So Wild, Yet So Together : The eclectic, nearly-anarchic band shakes up the Coach House with its special, fun blend of mania and music.

One would think that in running our best-of-the-year lists only four days before Dec. 31 that nothing too wonderful would escape notice. But that clearly hadn’t counted on NRBQ hitting town. Thursday evening the quartet delivered a wild 100-minute show at the Coach House that would earn a place on any year’s list.

NRBQ might just be the model for the ideal American society: a bunch of folks doing exactly what they feel like, exploring the full expression of individual freedom, but with the awareness, empathy and goodwill to make it all come together as a working whole.

The band’s sound is nearly anarchic, with elements of rockabilly, free jazz, sugary-’60s pop, R&B;, cartoon music, blues and other forms swirling about in a Wizard-of-Oz tornado. But no matter how many separate directions the band members seemed to be traveling in, the music always met up and swung like mad.

Although the band has been together more than 20 years without ever finding the hit or financial security it deserves, keyboardist Terry Adams, guitarist Al Anderson, bassist Joey Spampinato and drummer Tom Ardolino don’t show any signs of wear. Rather, there was an unrepressed glee on stage, with the occasional sly Duke Ellington-ish smile playing across a face or two, as if they’re still amazed the people will pay them to have so much fun.

The band never works from a set list. Instead, the ever-manic Adams follows his whim through the hundreds of songs the band knows, and several it doesn’t, and often just launches into them, with the band magically catching his drift within the first few notes. Thursday’s mapless journey included a number of songs from the band’s ‘70s catalogue, selections from last year’s excellent “Wild Weekend” (which the band typically didn’t bother to promote while playing on arena tours opening for Bonnie Raitt and R.E.M.), an ode to Girl Scout cookies, and so on. The quartet even managed to humor an audience request to play the saccharine Bobby Goldsboro hit “Watching Scotty Grow.”

The group’s musicianship often appeared to be as offhanded as its song selection, with Anderson appropriating a Budweiser bottle to invent a slide-guitar passage on “Fraction of Action.” While he finger-picked a lush chordal solo on “Won’t You Come Over to My House,” on the wild rocking “Crazy Like a Fox” he flailed away at his Telecaster like he was trying to strip off its garish paisley finish.

Throughout the performance Adams slapped, slugged and karate-chopped his keyboards with abandon, but his pummeling always produced the tastiest, if most abstract, licks imaginable. If Adams has often been likened to a cross between Jerry Lee Lewis and Thelonious Monk, it is only because the image is so apt. He perfectly combines Lewis’ fiery recklessness with the spare freedom and novel chordings of Monk’s work.

On the R&B; tune “Honey Hush,” Adams thundered out the sort of barrelhouse piano solo one might expect if the barrels were filled with nitro and Everclear, while on another jazzy number his rhythmic blocking and right-hand whimsy recalled Erroll Garner. On many of the songs, Adams played the Clavinet, an instrument with the most argumentative tone this side of Robert Dornan. On “Wacky Tobacky” he also whipped out an ancient, duct-taped instrument called a Rocksicord, which sounded somewhat like a cross between the world’s most defective organ and a vacuum cleaner.

Even the band’s roadies are something special: Soundman Klem Klimek joined the group for several numbers on tenor sax, including a Pharoah Sanders-like version of Junior Walker’s “What Does It Take (to Win Your Love)?”

While most of the fireworks came from Adams and Anderson, the rhythm section of Spampinato and Ardolino also flew, as they grooved, with the sweet-voiced Spampinato also singing a majority of the band’s melodies, which held up very well amid all the group’s rampaging music.

County guitarists Will Brady and Jodi Siegel (joined by a drummer on most songs) opened with a set of finely executed, if somewhat generic, blues numbers.