Neon Neon, Digital, Brighton Fleet Foxes, Waterfront, Norwich

After releasing consistently brilliant albums for 15 years as leader of the sublime Super Furry Animals without so much as a sniff of an award, Gruff Rhys must have given up on ever getting shortlisted for the Mercury. In his most perverse dreams – and, if you've read an SFA lyric booklet, you'll know that these are likely to be very perverse – he surely never expected it to happen with a project as bizarre as Neon Neon.

Stainless Style, a collaboration with American laptop boffin Boom Bip, is – brace yourselves – a synthpop concept album about the life of Icarus-like Eighties motor magnate and part-time cocaine smuggler John DeLorean, best remembered for the DMC-12, the wing-doored car immortalised by Back to the Future. And, against all the odds, it's a work of genius.

Its presentation is every bit as unconventional as the record itself, more of a rolling revue than a concert. On a stage that's dimly illuminated but for the flicker of animations that look like they were done on a ZX Spectrum, Gruff announces: "Ladies and gentlemen, the next President of the United States of America, Har Mar Superstar!"

The rotund sex-dwarf himself, wearing a fetching baseball shirt with gold lamé sleeves, in turn exclaims: "Yo Brighton! Are you ready for the sweet saccharine sounds of Cate Le Bon?", and so it continues, with much use of Dylanesque cue cards ("Oh!", "Thank you" and, most successfully, "Applause"), and a further cameo by Shunda from support act Yo! Majesty on "Sweat Shop", an almost Conchord-esque pastiche of rump-shaking ragga.

As DeLorean's life unfolds – an affair with Raquel Welch, an encounter with Michael Douglas, going bankrupt in Belfast and, to the amusing accompaniment of interpretative dancing from Har Mar and Le Bon, his death – it's Gruff who is the focal point of the supergroup, wielding a pair of drumsticks with red LEDs glowing at the tips, his Gwynedd accent accidentally imbuing words like "disco" and "brunch" with a rich comedic flavour.

But, for all the humorous hoopla, it's always the songs – from the elegiac electro of "I Lust U" to the storming pop rock of "I Told Her on Alderaan" – which are the stars. If the success of Neon Neon means that other, lesser talents will tackle the concept album, we're doomed. But if it means more people lend an ear to the Super Furries, it's a silver lining indeed.

"Does it really," asks Robin Pecknold with mock-exasperation of a stage-hand who has been overly enthusiastic with the dry-ice machine, "make us that much more majestic?"

Sidekick Skyler Skjelset warms to the theme. "People are going to go away saying: 'Those guys are so mysterious, they conjured up a fog with their moodiness.' "

This digression, in turn, leads into a sub-digression about setting up a model train system on stage, which is followed by a debate about the logic behind the positioning of Starbucks outlets, and whether they'd view kebab shops as rivals or a different market.

This whole spoken interval was originally prompted by a simple crowd call of "You're wonderful!" Some people just don't know how to take a compliment, but this bashful band from Seattle had better start getting used to it. A band steeped in Americana, with a beardy, straggle-haired singer who looks like a missing King of Leon, Fleet Foxes ought, on paper, to be a hard sell to someone like me. But paper isn't their element. With the bare minimum of hype, they're one of 2008's word-of-mouth successes.

What Fleet Foxes have done is to blend West Coast hippie rock (think steel guitars and close harmonies) with Elizabethan madrigals, and – as a side-effect – inadvertently revealed the latter to be a hitherto-undetected ancestor of the former.

The songs, brought to life with ukulele, piano and tambourine as much as with larynx and fretboard, are – in their words – "baroque harmonic pop jams", expressing 21st-century concerns over 1970s sounds, or in some cases, 1570s sounds. They've been through the desert on a horse with no name, hey nonny no.

It's ridiculously haunting (that between-song chat is necessary just to settle the nerves, lest it all become too much), utterly incongruous, and quite beautiful.