Jayhawks mine the melancholy romance vein

After a set that drew a standing ovation from the audience at the Keswick Theatre on Saturday night, the Jayhawks opened their encore with "Love Hurts," hewing closely to the immortal version by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.

It was a fairly obvious choice for a band credited as a formative influence on the alt-country movement, but it also summed up the 90-minute set's subtext.

Led by Mark Olson and Gary Louris, who recently released Mockingbird Time, their first album under the Jayhawks banner in 16 years, they worked the terrain of melancholy romance with single-minded devotion.

The set drew evenly, and overwhelmingly, from Mockingbird Time and 1995's Tomorrow the Green Grass, Olson's swan song with the band and its commonly acknowledged high-water mark.

The three succeeding albums, recorded with Louris in the lead role, were almost totally elided, as, more surprisingly, was 2008's Ready for the Flood, recorded by Olson and Louris without the rest of the band. It was as if the intervening years had never happened, or at least as if no one wanted to acknowledge them.

Vocally, Olson and Louris are an odd pair, although the songs' end-to-end harmonies made it difficult to extricate one from the other. When Olson took an unalloyed lead on "Miss Williams' Guitar" (written about Victoria Williams, now his ex-wife), his voice was reedy, almost unpleasantly nasal. Louris, who came to the fore on "I'd Run Away," was fluttery and quavering. Over and above the fact that the two write better songs together than each on his own, they need each other on a practical level, each underlining the other's strengths and buttressing his weaknesses.

One weakness they share is a penchant for lyrical floridity, which was underlined on the songs from Mockingbird Time by slick arrangements that occasionally verged on the saccharine. Perhaps no amount of instrumental grit could redeem a line like "There's so much color in the sky that's in your eyes," but a song like Tomorrow's "Blue" balanced the melancholy sentiment with a spare opening and driving drumbeat.

In the midst of "Love Hurts," Olson started goofing around, moaning "Yeah, baby," like a sleazy lounge singer. It's too bad a touch of that self-deprecation didn't creep into the Jayhawks' own songs.