Holland's humor saves the day

Jolie Holland's distinctive vocals were on display at the Museum of Fine Arts. (Josh Reynolds for the Boston Globe)

The fates didn't appear to be smiling on Jolie Holland at the very start of Saturday's sold-out performance at the Museum of Fine Arts. Bassist Dave Depper had napped so late that he didn't have time to change from his tiger hoodie into the statelier garb favored by the rest of her band. Holland herself began by apologizing for fiddling with her hair, her barrette having vanished as soon as she took the stage. That quickly took a back seat to a bigger issue: "My guitar strap is missing. That's not good luck."

Maybe not, but barrettes and straps were quickly acquired and Holland shook off the ill omen with unflappability and good humor. Holland's songs might be a dusky blend of Lucinda Williams storytelling, Tom Waits clatter and moan, and Sam Phillips pop-noir deconstruction, but she spent much of her performance simply telling jokes. She especially got a lot of mileage out of the word "narwhal," inspired by a fan's costume at her Halloween show the night before.

Holland also commented on the lecture-hall setting of the MFA's Remis Auditorium, which offered a sharp-lined and academic contrast to the gothic rustica of songs like the Waits-ish "Fox in its Hole" and the barroom waltz of "Sweet Loving Man." Her guitar sounded as though it was being transmitted from half a century back on the upbeat but resigned "Palmyra," and the intro to "Your Big Hands" (introduced as "the girliest song in our lexicon") would have sounded Stonesy if not for guitarist Sean Flinn's decaying reverb.

As a result, the songs occasionally offered up little more than mood. Once Holland finished coaxing a cracked, howling sound out of her rectangular fiddle, for instance, the lightly stomping "Alley Flowers" quickly grew repetitive despite its gradually increasing chaos. But her warble of a voice, recalling Williams in the way she shaped her vowels as though they were something she needed to work her mouth around, kept things from fading out of focus.

The result could be as small as the simple word "is" ending up with three syllables or as major as "Crush in the Ghetto," where her vocal sounded like an extremely drunk person trying to explain herself before incomprehensibility set in. Perhaps that was why, even though she said that the dark and rolling "Old Fashioned Morphine" was intended as a joke, Holland delivered it with enough offhand intensity that the punchline didn't seem quite so funny anymore.

French duo Herman Dune opened up with a set marked by a dry whimsy and gentleness. Freewheeling and endearingly modest in ambition, their songs resembled a stripped-down Silver Jews with a cheerier worldview.