THE WANDERING STARS' show at the Mission Creek Music Festival was a semireunion of a band that are now, technically speaking, only semilocal, as two of the members, guitarist Christof Certik and bassist Jim Laney, have moved away in recent years. It wasn't the fest's biggest or most crowded show, but it was the highlight for me.

I became fascinated with this band after hearing their self-titled 1995 CD on the label Nuf Sed just a few months ago. Yeah, I was late coming to it, but regardless, it's one of the most puzzlingly out-of-its-era albums I've heard in ages, sporting a light, countryish pop sound that hasn't been heard since the glory days of Glen Campbell's late-'60s collaborations with Jimmy Webb, which include thrift-store staples such as "Wichita Lineman" and "Galveston." I couldn't decide if, like those albums, the Stars were really amazing or really terrible. The fact that I'd never seen them – live or in photographs – only added to the mythical quality I'd ascribed to them.

Well, it turns out rhythm guitarist Jon Fellman, one of the band's two founding members, is someone I've seen around town at least a dozen times without knowing who he was. Still, despite the familiar face, the Stars' set upheld my view of them as one-of-a-kind in this newfangled, post-everything-modern era. It's not just the sound of the music, but also the delivery – the innocent, tradition-based showbiz approach – that distinguishes them. They're conscious of their role as entertainers in a way that separates them from the indie rock-leaning alt-country crew and has more to do with Motown bands, old-fashioned C&W singers, and Vegas lounge acts. In other words, they're well-rehearsed and devoid of irony, and they let people know they really want them to enjoy the show even if they look kind of square in the process.

Onstage, the focal point is the Wandering Stars' other cofounder, singing drummer Andrew Rush. Along with Laney's finessed bass playing, Rush's drumming is a model of simplicity and economy, giving the band's songs their characteristic gentle bounce. But as soft as his delivery is, his voice really commands attention. Standard descriptors such as plaintive, wholesome, and earnest don't quite do it justice, although it is all of those things. The closest comparison I can think of is obscure folksinger-songwriter Bob Lind, a late-'60s relic best known for the minor hit "Elusive Butterfly" (a perennial dark horse on "worst song of all time" polls, usually placing a few notches below Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" and Zager and Evans's "In the Year 2525," two other amazing, baffling works from that era).

Rush doesn't have the self-absorbed, whiny delivery of Lind, nor does he draw from the same wellspring of high school-grade poetic metaphors, but the clean-cut, voice-cracking earnestness is pretty similar. On record his most striking performance is on "I'm Poison," a ballad that climaxes with the classic lines "You wanna love me / But trust me / Go away and don't look back.... I am wrong for you, I'm not good for you.... I'm poison" – lines that sound incongruous coming from such a sensitive, guileless voice. They played that song early on in the set, and it sounded exactly like it did on the eight-year-old recording, minus the sweetening strings and the timpani (played on the record by percussion maestro William Winant).

Speaking of showbiz tradition, the other high point was the extended medley they did halfway through the set, which doubled as a history of the band (especially helpful for those of us who'd never seen them before). It started out with a couple of songs from their first 7-inch – back when Rush and Fellman were working as a more rustic, less polished-sounding duo – then wound through a bunch of other songs from the full-length, interspersed with key changes galore and plenty of good-natured storytelling from Rush about things like making their first recordings on 18th Street and "signing their first recording deal."