POP MUSIC REVIEW : MIXED SET FROM HOWLERS

Omar & the Howlers’ leader Omar Dykes, opening Sunday night’s Palomino show with “Mississippi Hoo Doo Man,” tore into a guitar break that wasn’t so much a solo as a two-fisted grab bag of percussive, country-blues tricks ‘n’ licks: punching the instrument with his fist, bending the neck one way and the body the other, shifting pickups in and out of phase with his right hand while playing a repetitive figure with his left. . . .

Great. Unfortunately, the Austin-based quartet stayed on stage another hour. Despite such highlights as the turbocharged rockin’ populism of “Hard Times in the Land of Plenty,” the breezy “Dancing in the Canebrake” and, especially, “Lee Anne,” an ab- soul- lutely astonishing slow minor blues the likes of which have not been written since Howlin’ Wolf (Dyke’s chief vocal inspiration) died about a decade back, the rest of the set trod, somewhat ploddingly, over blues-rock-soul sod.

All right, all right, all right. This kind of music is formalized to the point of ritual. But when--either by semi-originality or sheer conviction--a band such as Omar & the Howlers shows the ability to do something besides paint by numbers (and these guys do), then keeps turning around and falling back on dance-floor readymades, it just makes the latter sound more boring than they probably actually were.

Omar & the Howlers. You could do worse. A lot worse.