Two blues-flavored albums step outside the formula, each with its own focus. Each treats blues not as the destination but as one stop, albeit a vital one, on the broad highway of America's vernacular music.

The Atlanta-based Delta Moon numbers Babylon is Falling its latest of 10 recordings. I am at a loss to understand how the band managed to elude my hearing all these years. Clearly, I've been missing something, an innovative reimagining of the bedrock sounds of old hymns, black gospel and downhome blues alongside the influences of broadly like-minded contemporaries Ry Cooder, JJ Cale and Tom Petty. Other artists have ably blended old and new but none quite like this. Possibly it's the twin slide guitars of Tom Gray and Mark Johnson, producing sounds that seem to scatter time around them. It's as if you're never exactly in one space at any given moment; each time you hear it, you're hearing it from somewhere else.

More literally, the five members dish out a music that is at once straightforward and layered.

It helps that Gray and Johnson, who contribute originals under separate bylines, are unusually gifted writers. Or maybe they seem that way because they have the good sense to write sparingly and to supply only their jewels to the Delta Moon treasury. Hell, I'm only guessing. I do observe that most numbers are from other sources, among them the always reliable "traditional." To that ubiquitous composer we owe the spiritual "Nobody's Fault But Mine" (most prominently associated with Blind Willie Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe) and the folk hymn that provides the title. The latter, often sung by choral groups and bluegrass harmony quartets, delivers a message more current than ever in this time of roiling national uncertainty.

Gray, Johnson and others contribute to the lively "One Mountain at a Time," lit up by sly allusions to Stump Johnson and Howlin' Wolf. The latter's relatively obscure "Somebody in My Home" (which could be the title of an Investigation Discovery Channel true-crime show) is on the receiving end of an arrangement more convincing than many Wolf covers get. The band wisely treats Wolf's model as only a distant inspiration, for which nonetheless the song sounds hardly less rooted. The reading of R.L. Burnside's "Skinny Woman" is at once excited and restrained, celebratory and skeptical, in short the jaded yet hopeful sensibility of a seasoned erotic adventurer. On the other side the band offers up an affecting country-folk adaptation of Petty's "Louisiana Rain." The left-field "Little Pink Pistol," a Gray original, amounts to a meditation on sex and violence. In short, Babylon rises far above the usual run of modern-day blues records.

A Houston-based harmonica player, Steve Krase must have been having a whole lot of fun when he made Just Waitin', which definitely is not what he and his pals are doing here. They've thrown themselves heart and hand into some joyous music-making, mostly blues but also country and Cajun, usually given a jittery rockabilly edge which throws the listener, consciously or otherwise, into like motion.

The opener, "Settin' the Woods on Fire," reminds us that Hank Williams's star shone brightly as rock 'n' roll loomed just over the horizon. That explains why some of his songs translate so readily into rockabilly, which soon drove country into near-extinction. The Krase Band blazes through this amiable goof of a song (its subject matter in fact less innocent than fans grasped). It's not much like Hank's more celebrated fare, which was cheatin', drinkin' and existential agony. Later, Waitin' picks up on Flatt & Scruggs's 1962 bluegrass hit "The Ballad of Jed Clampett," the theme song for the low mental-wattage TV series The Beverly Hillbillies. That had to have been just about the worst song Lester and Earl ever cut, but Krase redeems it with a rattling Cajun arrangement -- is that a first? -- which works deliriously for both comic and musical purposes.

The band rocks itself up some Howlin' Wolf ("All in the Mood" and "My Baby Walked Off") as well as three cuts in which producer Rock Romano had a hand, plus other rockin' blues and roots-rockers. Krase shows, too, that he is adept at slow blues, Big Walter Price's "Nobody Loves Me," which gets all of 6:11 of pained reflection.

Nothing here has anything much to do with chart action in the second decade of the 21st century, but neither does it seem merely warmed over. Rather, it throws off the heat of a forest fire, and that feels like exactly the right temperature.