Conor Oberst is a uniquely talented and poetic singer-songwriter, able to evoke the anger of Dust Bowl balladeers while summoning the lyric imagery of Bob Dylan in the midst of a hard rain about to fall.

The rest of his band? Not so much.

The 29-year-old Nebraskan brought his Mystic Valley Band to headline the Utah Arts Festival's Summer Solstice concert Saturday in Library Square, a fundraiser for this week's festival. The 110-minute show displayed concrete glimpses of why the young guitarist and singer is so heralded by his cult followers and critically beloved.

The five-piece band (not counting Oberst) was tight, but the problem was for the first time on a Conor Oberst album (released earlier this year), he allowed other people to write songs and sing them. He sang lead on 17 of the 20 songs in Saturday's concert, but it was the lackluster offerings written and performed by Mystic Valley Band guitarist Taylor Hollingsworth, drummer Jason Boesel and guitarist Nik Freitas that dragged the show down.

In addition, while Oberst is gifted in that he can write in a variety of genres, songs from his last two albums -- both backed by the Mystic Valley Band -- were consistently rooted in a shuffling country-rock vein. That tends to make many of the songs sound similar to one another, especially when played live next to one another.

But those are the quibbles. Otherwise, the politically minded Oberst was clearly energized by playing in Utah, a place he had earlier fallen in love with when he was stuck in Moab for several days because of transportation problems. A beautiful song and one of Saturday's highlights was a song he had written about the experience, "Moab."

While he didn't banter much, when he did, he did so with wry daggers. "Is that the library?" he asked the crowd at one point. "Is that where they do the genealogy? I just want to know where I'll get baptized when I'm dead."

It rained until the concert's opening, and as a result the two openers, "Deep Sea Diver" and "Michael Runion," were each limited to catchy but unrevealing three-song sets. The rain scared away most of the walk-up traffic that organizers were hoping for, so the grass seating on Library Square was only half-full, about half of the crowd that showed up for fellow politically outspoken folk-rocker Ani DiFranco's sold-out Summer Solstice concert in 2008.

Despite the humidity and dampness, the acoustics were spectacular, foreshadowing a great weekend for music fans at this week's Arts Festival. Every word of Oberst's lyrics, sang in the Dylan-meets-Paul-Westerberg husky ache, were heard easily, especially during the quiet yet verbose "10 Women" and "Lenders in the Temple."

Those who left early were robbed of the night's most incendiary moments, as the enthusiastic country-rock band finished its four-set encore by rocking out with "I Don't Want to Die (In The Hospital)" and a raging "Roosevelt Room," the latter a bitter song directed to the Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina: "There's no blankets for the winter / There's no oil in the lamp / And I'd like to write my congressman / But I can't afford the stamp / You want me to pay my taxes / So you can propagate your lie / While there's barefoot dudes down in New Orleans / Looking like they're going to die." In that final song, Oberst stormed around the stage waving his guitar in the air, nearly screaming out the lyrics in a snarl of spit.

At times, the band sounded like it was playing rollicking organ-dusted outtakes from Dylan's legendary 1970s "Desire" album, and at others, the band drifted from one song into another without much ado. But the young band just needs more time playing together and more collaboration together as they get more familiar with one another, because, as the refrain of Oberst's "Moab" goes, "There's nothing that the road cannot heal."

dburger@sltrib.com