Among the most purely entertaining blues records I've heard this year, Ten Thousand Watts, from the Milwaukee-based Altered Five Blues Band, updates what (to my ears anyway) sounds like the kind of amplified-but-rooted music associated with Chicago's West Side during blues' golden age. Though one inevitably thinks of the music as "rockin'," as it does, it's still at its core blues, played by four guys and sung by one.

"Don't Rock My Blues," the title of one number, could capture that sentiment when many other bands that call themselves blues are guitar-rock acts seeking an ersatz authenticity. That's not the explicit message, which is a slow-tempo request by the singer to any who might make him feel worse than he already does. Still, the AFBB is in firm control of what it seeks to do, which is to keep blues alive, vital and linked to its defining musical identity in the 21st century. The guys manage to do it as capably as anybody you're going to hear these days.

They've been together for 17 years, long enough to effect an approach at once soulful and tight-edged. AFBB has a strong, in-the-tradition lead vocalist in Jeff Taylor and an exceptional songwriter in Jeff Schroedl, also an outstanding guitarist. Schroedl writes everything here, either by himself or with a collaborator. The titles alone caught my attention even before I'd heard the songs that accompany them: "Great Minds Drink Alike," "Let Me Do the Wrong Thing," "I Hate To Leave You (With a 6-Pack in the Fridge)." The last informs the woman to whom it's addressed: "You're more trouble than a one-way bridge." I'm not sure what that means, but it's as funny as the line that precedes it. You could imagine these titles attached to country songs, but blues has always had plenty of drinkin' and cheatin', too. Every one of the cuts is a little short story, persuasively delivered by the excellent Mr. Taylor.

Beyond that, the ultimate test of an album's worth, in my experience, is my desire to listen to it more than twice. So just let me say I've been listening to it almost daily since it arrived in the mail two or three weeks ago. In spite of the plea in the last cut, "Let Me Be Gone," you may just decide to play the album all over again.

Zac Harmon's Mississippi BarBQ features blues, r&b and soft soul in an appealingly varied program. My tastes being what they are, I am most attracted to the first of these but have no complaint about anything here. Born in Mississippi, Harmon moved to Los Angeles to write songs -- successfully -- for popular African-American pop artists but returned to blues with a 2003 recording. Generally speaking, his is a laid-back version, often accompanied by a horn section and back-up vocalists behind his sinewy lead guitar.

In other words, it's not Howlin' Wolf. Then again, nobody else has ever been either. The title tune, co-written with Catfood Records head Bob Trenchard (who also plays bass on the record), captures the spirit of much of the material: low-key, accessible, conversational. This one, though, is so food-specific -- "chicken and ribs on the grill, two kinds of pie on the windowsill, pickles and onions and collard greens, corn bread, and a big pot of beans" -- that you probably shouldn't listen if you're hungry. Maybe, even if you aren't when the song starts, you will be by the time it's through.

The artists on Battle of the Blues: Chicago vs. Oakland are an impressive lot albeit individuals who never found anything but local fame. Soul and blues artists of a certain age (one, Country Pete McGill, died months before the recording was released) and all African American, they're as gifted as their more celebrated counterparts. Blues drummer, songwriter and producer Twist Turner, who sought belated recognition for them, is responsible for the project.

The result is a beautiful, triumphal album which has become a large part of my summer listening. In the liner notes Turner recounts the travails (including a harrowing encounter with cancer) he underwent in the course of the album's creation. The idea came to him, he says, in 2013, but nothing went smoothly after that. We can all be grateful that the album is here, all 13 cuts' worth of superior songs (all but one written by Turner) and striking performances, and all from Chicago and Oakland artists whom most who read these words will not have heard of. I confess I hadn't, and I'm glad I can no longer say that.

Turner knows of them from his life in Chicago and a shorter stay (six years) in Oakland. Some are native Californians, others Chicagoans who remain in the Windy City; some migrated from Chicago to the Bay Area. The most novel of them is Chicagoan Freddie Roulette, not a vocalist but a master of the lap steel. His two instrumental contributions, "Take It Easy" and "Red Tide," sound like nothing I'd expect to hear on a blues album, by which I do not mean anything like criticism.

More typical are Gerald McClendon's "Cold in the Streets" (but "hot in the sheets," we're assured) and "Mr. Excitement" Del Brown's intense, riveting "Now That I'm Gone," the sort of vocal it would take a lifetime to master. The performances all come from that place where you have to live it because it isn't available to be faked. No false note sounds, and nothing does not thrill.