My apologies. If the traffic on I-80 hadn't been so ungodly congested this past Saturday night, you would now be reading a review of four bands, not two.

It's a good thing, then, that Joanna Newsom's and Sufjan Stevens' performances were decidedly angelic in cast that evening at the Great American. Certainly they had enough harp music and references to the Almighty between them to briefly revive this reviewer's dormant Jewish guilt. Both acts, however, also brought the rock, albeit with varying degrees of success.

Let me testify. Newsom, new to me and a distant cousin to mayor Gavin, was easily, easily the show's capital-H highlight. As we watched her set up her harp on stage, I shot my friends an eyebrow-raised glance. Already warned that her vocal style wasn't for everybody, I assumed that the clear novelty factor of her get-up portended no goodliness. And the fact that Newsom was also dressed up like St. Pauli's Girl didn't exactly help matters.

By her third song, however, I was ready to propose. I should be clear at this point that Newsom's vocals, which essentially marry Bjork to a Welsh goatherd, are definitely not for everybody and that these are a potential deal-breaker for many.

But they are also expressive, nuanced and confident. Newsom opened her set on Saturday with an a capella version of “Yarn and Glue” that had the entire audience transfixed from the first note.

Her voice also complemented, perfectly, her harp-playing, which was fluid and intricate, but also light and quirky. The harp, long-neglected by independent rock, turns out to be quite a dexterous instrument: simultaneously capable of delicate, folky melodies and infectious, mathy rhythms, at least as Newsom plays it. She can also, it must be said, solo with the best of them.

I feel like I should add a note about her lyrics. Rhyme-heavy and free-associative (yet strangely precise) these are often saved from too-cute territory by Newsom's cleverness with language. Odd phrasings (“I killed my dinner with karate,” lots of gnawing and chewing, bones) rub against more poignant moments (“And this is not my tune / but its mine to use”); the result is just beautiful.

Sufjan Stevens was something of a disappointment after Newsom. In his best moments, he played to the obvious strengths of his material as recorded and was intimate, delicate and sensitive. At his worst, he channeled nothing so much as a preachy Detroit-based Christian camp leader with a banjo.

Flanked by maps of his home state, Stevens opened his set by telling the audience that he “brought something else along” to the show: “Michigan.” The stage banter was generally downhill from there. As my friend Atticus adroitly pointed out, nobody but George Clinton has the right to tell an audience that he/she is “taking (it) on a musical journey,” and even then, it's a questionable move. The show was full of near-wince moments such as these.

Both Stevens and his backing band, the Michigan Militia, matched cheesy dialogue with cheesy costuming. I don't know if the band was intending to conjure up images of the Cub Scouts, but they certainly played the novelty card pretty gratuitously. Their matching outfits, it must be said, were an unfortunate distraction from the music itself.

And, as was not the case with Newsom, Stevens' banjo-heavy tunes didn't quite rescue his presentation. The members of his Militia were certainly talented, but slightly extraneous. Sheer hotness of his xylophone player excluded, I kept feeling as though the band didn't add much to Stevens' songs, which are most successfully affecting when they are pitched simply and directly, altogether stripped of shtick.

For his encore, Stevens came out and performed “Romulus,” the best cut from his “Greetings From Michigan” LP, supposedly first in a series of 50, one for each state. It was a nice moment, just Stevens and an acoustic guitar, low-pitched and pretty, simple but effective.

It sort of made me wish that he had done the whole show that way.