Three of O.C.’s Best Bluesmen Bring It on Home : James Harman gets comfy, Walter Trout makes his stateside recording debut, and Robert Lucas covers familiar ground in a striking way.

In a stroke of coincidence, the Big Three of the Orange County blues scene all have new releases out. James Harman’s revamped lineup has helped him craft one of his most charming and invigorating albums; the sizzling Walter Trout Band finally has a chance to let American fans know what Europeans already understand, and Robert Lucas continues to stake out his turf as a top-notch traditionalist. Ratings range from * (born under a bad sign) to **** (hallelujah, we love it so). Three stars denote a solid recommendation.

*** 1/2

James Harman Band

“Cards on the Table”

Black Top

Harman always has been at home in virtually every corner of the blues and rhythm & blues traditions. On this album, his best since “Extra Napkins” in 1988, he sounds as if he has entered a special zone of comfort.

As a singer, he slips with creamy ease and absolute authenticity into the mainly humorous roles he has written for himself. The players riding along with him seem to be enjoying the journey, too. Despite recent lineup changes, the Harman Band strikes the note of natural, unforced enjoyment that is its leader’s hallmark.

Joining Huntington Beach-based Harman and Jeff Turmes, his versatile right-hand man since the “Extra Napkins” lineup scattered in the late 1980s, are drummer Michael Cherry, who lays sound foundations without fuss or unneeded exertion, and guitarist Robby Eason, who may be the most musically mature 18-year-old in the blues universe.

Eason struts clean, stinging, Albert Collins-like leads during “Temporary Blues,” conversing as an equal with an experienced and accomplished guest guitarist, Texas blues veteran Anson Funderburgh.

Eason chugs along with clipped Chuck Berry-inspired licks in “Run, Run Tonight” and coyly meanders through “Last Clean Shirt.” He does sound stiff during his solo on “Crazy by Degrees,” a heavy shuffle a la Stevie Ray Vaughan, proving that there is room for development. Given the taste, tonal presence and versatility he displays elsewhere on this album, he is off to a promising start.

One thing Harman and band never do is strain for effect. They establish an assured, naturally flowing groove from the start with the sultry, swampy vamp “Night Ridin’ Baby.” The performance never boils over but simmers, embodying a cool, confident, expectant sexuality.

“Where’s My Thang” is a hilarious, funky, horn-driven R&B; workout in which Harman gives free rein to his genius for comic role-playing. He simultaneously inhabits and winks at the song’s character--a frazzled fellow who has put his trust in advertising that inflames his expectations with promises of ultimate satisfaction. Harman further explores his soul and R&B; influences with “Black Under Black,” a smooth and zesty number that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Van Morrison’s album “His Band and Street Choir.”

The bittersweet soul ballad “I’ll Call You” and the concluding dirge “Walk the Streets (Cold and Lonely)” give Harman a chance to emote sincerely. He brings a depth of feeling to both performances--again while maintaining that sense of unforced mastery.

Mainly, though, the Harman Band is out to have a good time. In “Don’t Spoil My View,” they remind people who have a perhaps too-religious or too-intellectual regard for the blues that the milieu matters as well as the music. Confronting fanatics who want to analyze every influence, every nuance of what he does, a comically peeved Harman looks down from the bandstand and asks them to back off a bit: While they study his harmonica technique from close range, they’re blocking his view of the pretty women who just want to dance to what he’s laying down:

You want to talk about Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Lightning Slim.

Well, we need to see these girls dance; you’re too wrapped up to notice them.

With “Cards on the Table,” the Harman Band glides along, taking in a wide vista of styles and subjects. The players clearly are enjoying the view and the moment, and their enjoyment is infectious. Harman has found a lineup worth putting in the field for a good, long stretch.

The James Harman Band plays July 2 at 9:30 p.m. at Jack’s Sugar Shack, 8751 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. (310) 271-7887.

***

Walter Trout Band

“Tellin’ Stories”

Silvertone

“Tellin’ Stories” (due for release Tuesday) is Trout’s belated U.S. recording debut. It follows four European releases, and while it isn’t his strongest album, it should establish the blues-rocker from Huntington Beach as a leading contender in the guitar-hero sweepstakes.

Listening to Trout blaze his way across this 74-minute marathon course is the blues equivalent of watching that wired-to-blow L.A. city bus skidding and careening through the movie “Speed.” In the film, the bus will explode if it slows to less than 50 mph; Trout, as ever, plays as if dire consequences would ensue should he pause during his torrent of notes.

It’s a guitar style that should come with an advisory -- “Don’t try this at home, or on record, or on stage”--because playing as wired and prolific as this almost invariably flies out of control, or falls into wearisome repetition. But Trout, who did his apprenticeship with those venerable blues institutions Canned Heat and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, has a way of making an excessive style work.

His volcanic eruptions are channeled cannily; if the notes gush like a molten flow, they nevertheless are molded into coherent shapes set off by Trout’s constant attention to tonal variation. Would Trout be more listenable if he reined himself in from time to time? Maybe, but it’s like asking whether a bull would be a more effective creature if he didn’t have that habit of charging every red cape he sees.

By now, it’s obvious that Trout’s high-voltage style is not a matter of calculation so much as the outward expression of an ingrained musical nature that’s a tad larger than life. Let Trout be Trout, and he can joust well enough to be pegged as a possible heir to the still-vacant flashy-ax throne last occupied by Vaughan.

“Tellin’ Stories” is a bit overstuffed: The album easily could have done without its concluding 11-minute slow blues workout (well, it’s Walter’s version of slow).

Another problem is the mix, which leaves many tracks sounding flat and cluttered, as if all the musical elements had been squeezed into a restricted space rather than left to stretch out and breath.

And, Trout’s songwriting isn’t up to the level he established on his best album, “Prisoner of a Dream” (1991). But these songs mainly avoid blues formula and hone in on moments of emotional crisis. Trout insists that wrong turns in life have consequences and that finding the right path is no easy matter. If his lyrics here are plain-spoken to a fault, at least it is in the service of ideas that have substance. And his above-average vocals never stint on passion.

He has a good ear for melodic hooks--he is one of those blues-based artists who conceivably could write a hit song. The best number here is “Please Don’t Go,” an epic ballad that works in plenty of pop content as Trout explores the welter of feelings unleashed upon a loved one’s death.

Trout always has done well with tense and stormy drama--and maybe goes overboard on “Tellin’ Stories” with repeated songs in that vein. “Somebody’s Cryin’ ” is the best of this record’s stormy bunch. In a nice production touch, some spacey, off-kilter guitar and vocal effects are worked in, evoking the confusion the narrator feels as he confronts a lover who only weeps and can’t articulate the source of her anguish.

Variety has been one of Trout’s strengths, and while “Tellin’ Stories” omits the simple, folk-song balladry that has provided a nice change of pace on past albums, there are such departures as the sweet soul ballad “I Need to Belong,” and “Time for Movin’ On,” a solid acoustic blues that brings a bit of much-needed sparseness and serves as a breather.

A Stones-influenced rocker, “Head Hung Down” goes for “Exile on Main Street”-style dirty grit. Despite a bad pun for a title, the churning, funk-inflected “On the Rise” does indeed raise its depiction of sexual sparks in a barroom to a higher plane of emotional intensity.

In sum, “Tellin’ Stories” is, like Trout’s previous albums, a display of hot guitar playing and lots of it, tempered by a consciousness of what’s important in our emotional lives and a sense of what’s involved in crafting a good song. While it’s not the most delicious catch in his net, there certainly is no need to toss it back.

The Walter Trout Band plays Friday through Sunday at Perqs, 117 Main St., Huntington Beach. (714) 960-9996.

*** Robert Lucas

“Layaway”

AudioQuest

With his strong 1992 album “Built for Comfort,” Lucas graduated from young-contender status to world-class mastery of traditional blues. “Layaway” keeps up the good work and again states his case for wider recognition.

While staying within the bounds of the confirmed traditionalist, Lucas manages to cover a good deal of stylistic ground, giving him a range of opportunities to display his striking all-around ability as a singer, guitarist, harmonica player and songwriter.

The album opens with “If You Don’t Want Me,” a funky, horn-embellished workout that has some early Ray Charles in it. And that’s just the start of a refreshing journey that stops in the Mississippi Delta for solo-acoustic slide guitar blues in the Robert Johnson vein, and also moves up Chicago way for straight electric blues employing an excellent full-house of a band that includes organ, piano, horns, and two or three supporting guitarists in addition to Lucas, a mean slide player.

There’s also a jumping, swinging number, “High Priced Baby,” that’s full of finger-wagging fun, and a concluding reprise of the opening track that brings it all back home by incorporating both the rural Delta influence and the insinuating urban grooves.

In each mode, Lucas and partners play with a loose, down-home flair that you’d expect from juke-joint pros--never fussy, but never sloppy. Each player gets his due during “Long Train Coming,” a slow instrumental that stays entertaining over the course of 9 1/2 minutes due to the strength and contrasting musical temperaments of the various soloists.

If you took away the harmonicas Lucas puts to coy, playful use, and forbade him to touch a guitar, you’d still be left with a bluesman who could forge ahead just on the strength of his singing. He has a big, burlap sack of a voice--deep, rough and earthy--that sounds as if it were piped in from 1935. He has the taste to emphasize intimacy with it, rather than trying to overpower a song.

He pays tribute to Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters with “300 Pounds of Joy” and “Baby Please Don’t Go,” throwing in enough twists to keep the oldies lively. Otherwise, the material is original.

Most of the songs are in the familiar woman-done-me-wrong mode. But Lucas, who often has applied his own modern songwriter’s perspective to traditional forms, gives his lyrics a contemporary edge by posing drug abuse as an underlying reason for the unreliability of his would-be lovers.

“Cinderella Blues,” a solo-acoustic song about a crack-addled woman, is the most memorable composition here, and it’s the one song in which Lucas takes a few liberties with handed-down tradition. His guitar accompaniment is straight out of the rural blues handbook, but above it rides an airy folk-pop melody delivered partly in a falsetto voice. It sounds like Donovan-goes-to-the-Delta, a departure from expected blues form that lends an element of surprise to go with the familiar satisfactions found elsewhere.

This is Lucas’ fourth album for AudioQuest Music, the San Clemente company whose main business is selling audiophile stereo cables. As before, the presentation is as classy as the performance. Once more, Lucas and his supporting cast were recorded live without overdubs in a studio, using analog tape rather than digital recorders, and the music comes across with such clarity, depth and presence that you’d swear you were on the bandstand with them.

The album package again offers exceptional artwork and photography. Fans of pre-’60s blues may be busy filling out their collections with the rich trove of reissued classics that the CD revolution has put on the market, but they won’t be disappointed if they take this one home, too.

Robert Lucas is on tour . So far, there are no local dates.