With the focus at Antone's drifting steadily "into the new" and the local patron saint (and club namesake) gone on, um, extended leave, it might seem like Austin's blues fans have reason to fret. If this compilation is any indication, though, they needn't worry; the future is, quite literally, in good hands.

Said hands aren't shackled by tradition, however. "Texas Blues Evolution" features up-and-coming Lone Star six-stringers (mostly local) taking tunes by their blues heroes (mostly Johnsons) and mixing in rock, country, etc.

Sometimes the gernre-bending doesn't work, for want of either talent (youngster Jonas Wilson can't quite pull off his funked-up stab at Robert Johnson on "Kind Hearted Woman") or musicality (Jesse Dayton's clanging version of Hound Dog Taylor's "Gimme Back My Wig" is discordant and dull), and the album threatens toslp int mediocrity about midway through. But most of these voodoo children succeed in their experiments, resulting in hybrids that, as the title suggests, say as much about where the blues are going as where they've been.

Matt Powell cops the rollicking riff from "What'd I Say" and and turns John Lee Hooker's "Running Shoes" (about a guy fleeing from his lover's "bad old man") into a brisk Allman-style jam, backed by a beat that grows more frantic as the chase intensifies. Twang-rocker Teddy Morgan's countrified rendition of Lazy Lester's "Secret Weapon," is either an innocent ode to optimism or the sweetest stalker theme since "Every Breath You Take," complete with bright acoustic strumming and horse-clop percussion.

The album's finest cut, though, belongs to C.C. Adcock, whose swampy, reverb-drenched take on Edwin Johnson's "Castin' My Spell" pairs Adcock's rasping, devilish vocals and scorching guitar with the supernatural lyrical imagery of the original for maximum spookiness. Toward the end, awash in thick distortion, he snarls a warning: "I'm a pretty face/guitar ace/I'm comin' to your town!" The line is fired off like the first shot in a revolution, full of the irreverent swagger that "Evoltion"'s best tracks share. For these young guitar slingers, the times they are a-changin' and the waters rising, the latest in a long line of Texas floods.

-- Josh Eells