Oberst's a nice fit for country

Conor Oberst, still on a high from the election of Barack Obama, performs at the Roxy on Wednesday. (aram boghosian for the boston globe)

A day after Barack Obama made history, Conor Oberst still needed to be pinched.

"So last night was a big night, right?" he asked the crowd at the Roxy on Wednesday. "It's still kind of setting in for me. It doesn't seem real just yet."

Earlier in the evening Oberst, who had played at rallies for Obama, gave a succinct but forceful endorsement of the president-elect: "It's [expletive] great to be an American again."

On a personal note, Oberst said, he'll forever associate Boston with Obama's victory. Oberst and his Mystic Valley Band were holed up in their hotel room here on election night. When a party broke out on the street, they found themselves swimming with drunken strangers in a fountain. The best part? "We were drinking champagne out of cowboy boots," Oberst said.

Now, I'm guessing that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the image fits Oberst these days. At 28, he's two full-length albums deep into his country-rock phase, and the genre suits him like a snug rhinestone jacket. With echoes of the Band and Bob Dylan's album "Desire" (1976), Oberst now writes about his canteen and sings, almost like a hymn, about how "there's nothing that the road cannot heal."

When those words rung out in unison on "Moab," the power of Oberst with a full band hit like a tidal wave. In his early teens, Oberst became an indie-rock wunderkind in his hometown of Omaha and later started a collective called Bright Eyes. Once a self-conscious kid sulking in the corner, Oberst now connects on a broader level, both sonically and lyrically.

The peril of a group dynamic, of course, is that it can compress the singular qualities that first made Oberst so unique, namely his tortured vocals. But his voice often rose above the fray. On "Cape Canaveral," haunted by twangy effects and Oberst tapping his acoustic, he spat out the words as if he couldn't bear the bitter taste anymore.

He leaned heavily on hard-charging country-rockers - "I Don't Want to Die (in the Hospital)" and "Slowly (So Slowly)," but the bare-bones moments struck the deepest chords. Oberst went practically unplugged on "Milk Thistle," with only bassist Macey Taylor at his side. It was a reminder of how far his songwriting has come: "If I go to heaven/ I'll be bored as hell/ Like a little baby/ At the bottom of a well."

Earlier, the Felice Brothers, a motley crew of rowdy Americana rockers from New York who extolled the virtues of "Whiskey in my Whiskey" (as in, keep pouring), sounded more like Oberst's extended family than an opening band.

James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com.