The National are currently indie rock’s prestige band, and four out of five doctors agree: their genius new album, High Violet, entered the charts recently at #3 – not bad for guys whose wardrobe choices are invincible to parody by, say, Andy Samberg.

What’s incredible is that, in between two huge sold-out Los Angeles shows, The National stopped by the Old-Style guitar shop in Silverlake on Saturday, May 22nd to commemorate the store’s grand opening, playing a drummer-less show to sixty some people. That’s due to the band’s relationship with Old-Style proprietor Reuben Cox. Cox (also a great photographer) is the couture custom guitar maker to the indie-rock elite: he created many of the guitars that the National used on High Violet, and Cat Power and, um, Duran Duran have also been known to strum a Cox instrument onstage herself.

It’s no surprise the National are so taken with Cox’s beautiful guitars, with their vintage necks and pickups and clearly handcrafted style somewhere between retro and future classic. At Old-Style, the band played the store’s guitars with the tags still hanging off them, and the casual nature gave the songs new dimension. Using a loading dock as a stage, frontman Matt Berninger, twin guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner and bassist/guitarist Scott Devendorf gave the band’s already introspective slo-mo songs—which spanned new tracks from High Violet to the National’s indie hit “Fake Empire”—an even more intimate, enthralling vibe. How different the songs felt was striking even to the band under the midday California sun. “In this setting, they sound like Jack Johnson songs,” Berninger cracked between numbers; to us, however, they just sounded awesome…