While Dispatch had never played at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway, their back-to-back concerts on Oct. 18-19 certainly felt like a homecoming for this band with Boston-area and northeast roots.

Early on, the band let the crowd know “It’s great to be home.” I also ran into a friend on the general admission floor before the show started who said she grew up in Sherborn nearby with co-founder Chad Stokes’s family, and before the night was done, the band was wishing Mama Stokes a Happy Birthday.

dispatch at mgm music hall — Dispatch at MGM Music Hall

The band, which formed in the 1990s at Middlebury College and played classic Boston and Cambridge venues like Bill’s Bar and the Middle East, has morphed over the years to have a more harmonized sound on recent albums than during its early rootsy years. On Friday night, when we attended, the 5-member band (plus guests, including a trombone player named Sam, and Matt Quinn from Mt. Joy as the unplugged opener) spanned multiple genres from rock to reggae during a 17-song set.

The Friday show wasn’t quite sold out (we heard the Dover-Sherborn crowd would be flocking to Saturday’s concert in full force), but it was still standing-room-only through most of the venue, including where patrons had seats.

As the band told us during a recent interview, they’re working on a new album that will return them to their reggae-infused roots. Indeed, a new tune called “Johnny Whoop” was one example of that, with full-on skanking guitars and horns on a song inspired by a kids’ game that the band acknowledged “No one knows what the f*** we’re talking about.”

The set borrowed heavily from more recent albums like “America, Location 12,” though also included older favorites from 1997’s “Bang Bang” and “2000’s “Who Are We Living For?”.

A cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band” near the end also had the crowd singing along. True to form, Dispatch played a much different set during its Saturday set, though also sprinkled in new tunes.

As a first-time Dispatch concert goer and jam-averse music listener, I appreciated the lack of endless songs—as well as the band weaving Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning” into its own song “Passerby” from 2000. Not to say there wasn’t any jamming, as with the hair-flying ending to “Midnight Lorry,” or on the drum solo during “Here We Go.”

I also appreciated the band’s enthusiasm and versatility. Co-frontman Brad Corrigan switched from one guitar to another and midway through the set, to drums. Stokes and Corrigan had told me that when they go to a show they like to see that bandmates actually like each other, and it was apparent that they and their bandmates enjoyed each other’s company on stage as they got close-up with dueling guitars on songs like “Passerby.” This isn’t a band where members hunker down in one spot on the stage—they moved around freely.

Dispatch largely stuck to the music, with intermittent banter and one plug to get out and vote during this election season (Dispatch has had an “AMPlifying Democracy” theme on this tour.

The band rocked for most of the show, including banger “Skin the Rabbit” to end the main set. But Dispatch did away with the flashy red and blue stage lights and stripped down their instrumental setup a couple of times, too. This included a five-across setup at the front of the stage during the encore, with members donning Red Sox shirts at this venue attached to Fenway Park.