Every 15 years or so we seem to get another blues revival. Revivals imply something dead being brought back to life, which means the blues isn't considered a living, breathing musical form, but something frozen in time, and each successive generation that revives it is further removed from the cultural and spiritual milieu that gave rise to it.

Garrett Dutton, the former Philadelphia busker who goes by the stage name G. Love, means to forge a more direct link to that hallowed past. He performs like a front-porch bluesman, with a drawling delivery and loose-limbed impulsiveness. Onstage he mostly sits, his long legs bouncing around on the balls of his feet, head swiveling back-and-forth as if it were attached to his neck with ball-bearings.

At times this kind of thing comes uncomfortably close to minstrelsy, but while Love appreciates authenticity, he also acts his age. When he walked out on stage at Shibuya Club Quattro Jan. 25, the first thing the twentysomething did was hit skins with a bunch of fans up front, as if he had just stopped by the park on his way home from school to play some three-on-three. With a big knit cap pulled down over his ears and a big electric guitar riding high on his chest, he was Kid Blues.

And like that other white Kid, Love raps. No one will ever mistake him for Big Daddy Kane, but his blues and hip hop are an organic synthesis. Thematically and attitudinally, the two genres have much in common, but for a white guy to attempt the mix takes nerve. Love's synthesis works because, unlike Beck, he doesn't intellectualize it.

In fact, I would guess he isn't even capable of it. His performance was as loose as his big white suit, and his guitar remained untuned for several songs at a time. At the end of "Dreamin'," a self-important rap about his street smarts and how they helped him become "a rock 'n' roll star," Love exhorted everyone to "throw your hands in the air," and then started doing a Philly soul man vamp that caught his backup band, Special Sauce, by surprise. Soon, he was buggin' on something else.

It was a heady, anarchic mix of black music styles, and a few times the show almost collapsed in on itself from lack of structure. Special Sauce's job was to see that it didn't. The two Boston longhairs look notably older and wiser than their frontman. You could sense in their instinctive musicality years of playing behind guys who thought they were hot stuff but probably weren't.

I would even go so far as to say that drummer Jeffrey "Houseman" Clemens is a better singer than Love, or at least a more natural one. He has the smooth, conversational delivery of '60s pop folk singers like John Sebastian, but his background shouts on the bouncy "Kiss and Tell" were riveting. Love is never natural. He assumes the appropriate blues or rap or soul vocal mode for each song. Musically, he's never so much himself as when he's trying to be someone else.

That's a fair description of musicians who continue to identify with the blues after they've graduated to other forms, which is the case with most young rock artists. On Feb. 3, I saw the group Gomez make their Japan debut at Shibuya On Air East. Hailed by English critics as a welcome blast of fresh air to the stale, stuffy confines of Britpop (their debut album beat out Massive Attack and the Verve for the coveted Mercury Prize in 1998), the five-piece-band-plus-one doesn't strictly play the blues but rather a kind of secondhand R&B reminiscent of hippie groups from the '60s, like Canned Heat and Moby Grape, who tried to channel their affection for the blues into something more idiosyncratic.

Exuding a vibe that was even more youthful than Love's, Gomez wasn't half as cool. Love is something of a hustler, custom-made for Martin Scorcese movies. Everyone in Gomez looks as if their ambition is to become Kris Kristofferson someday.

The music often seems to favor form over style and feeling, a tendency that I've noticed in most post-Radiohead English rock groups, regardless of the type of music they play. Though Gomez fortify their country R&B with the requisite English groove, they rarely follow an idea to its natural R&B conclusion. At the end of "Bring It On," the group accelerated into a full-tilt boogie, which they brought to an abrupt halt 30 seconds later. The packed house, which was clearly on the band's side, seemed momentarily crestfallen. "Play more!" some guy screamed in desperation.

If the band has an ace in the hole, it isn't their rootsy authenticity or their robust instrumental bridges but Ben Ottewell. He's like no other vocalist in England right now. You'd have to go back to Gary Brooker to find a rock singer who puts across such soulful abandon with the same conviction. At the end of the otherwise unexceptional downer ballad "Make No Sound," Ottewell let out a sustained bellow whose control and intensity sent shivers down my spine. The two other vocalists are chipmunks in comparison.

It's too soon to talk solo career, but I can see Ottewell surviving Gomez. The group's second album, "Liquid Skin," is less bluesy than their debut and also more tentative. The reason the blues is such a comfort to young musicians is that it provides ready-made formulas that take the guesswork out of writing and performing. But only a genius or a truly tortured soul can go on to make compelling, lasting art as a straight blues musician. There are too many ghosts you have to compete with.