Moore Has Cure for What Ails Modern Rock : Pop music review: In his Galaxy performance, the guitarist provides a dose of folk medicine with a fresh blend of the past and present.

Ian Moore wasn’t only being truthful about his own music when he named his new album “Modernday Folklore.” The soulful young blues-rock bandleader from Austin, Tex., was also being insightful about the condition of belatedness that has befallen all of rock in the ‘90s.

With the arrival and passing of each fresh new ballyhooed attraction, it becomes more obvious that guitar-based rock has exhausted all the musical possibilities that were there to be mined when Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the other inventors started digging.

It’s the age of recapitulation, and the worthiest newcomers of the mid-’90s, a diverse roster that includes Elastica, Pavement, Rancid and Wilco, are united by the common, insurmountable fact that everything they can think to do has already been done.

Rock-as-recapitulation can seem downright disheartening if one insists on new invention as the primary basis for bestowing value on music. Better to be a traditionalist, to take Ian Moore’s cue and think of rock as “modern-day folklore.”

In the hands of the right singers and players, songs from the British Isles hit parade circa 1700 can sound full of life today. We can assume, therefore, that if rock’s folklore is properly passed down, audiences in the 23rd Century will be getting kicks out of guitar licks familiar to our own ears.

The key, from here on out, is for each new generation of highly amped folkies to freshen borrowed forms with vigorous playing and the personal, imaginative touches that can instill familiar styles with emotional immediacy and fresh meaning.

Moore certainly did a fine job of it Thursday night at the Galaxy Concert Theatre. Everything he played (and he played plenty in a show that erred on the side of generosity, stretching past the two-hour mark) was, stylistically, a hand-me-down that could be traced to Jimi Hendrix, Cream or their electric-blues antecedents. For a change of pace, Moore was able to raid the soul-R & B aisle of the roots-rock supermarket, plucking out some concentrate-of-Sly here, a bit of reconstituted Free there.

But Moore put substance into his songwriting and conviction into his delivery as he proved that the well-deployed past can help musicians speak to their own, contemporary concerns.

Several times, he pulled out a gem from the past to serve as a lead-in for one of his own songs. By attaching Hendrix’s “Castles Made of Sand” to his own elegiac song of yearning, “Blue Sky,” Moore established not just a stylistic connection, but also an enriching thematic and emotional conversation between himself and his precursor.

He did the same by using Sly Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey” as a prelude (delivered in a searing, anguished solo-voice plus guitar reading) to his own “Harlem,” a stricken meditation on the sadness and seemingly inextinguishable horror of American race relations.

Toss in imaginative sallies such as “Today,” a luminous song of reconciliation with death, and “Muddy Jesus,” in which Moore conceives of the returning messiah as “a charismatic cholo” from Mexico who gets gunned down at the border by some trigger-happy Migra , plus such lighter and earthier fare as Muddy Waters’ “Champagne & Reefer” (rendered by Moore on a new, multiple-artist compilation called “Hempilation” aimed at decriminalizing marijuana use), and you had a well-rounded evening that offered both instrumental sizzle and thematic substance.

Moore, who got his training in fellow Austinite Joe Ely’s band--a great place to learn about roots-rock stylings and the importance of putting a storyteller’s substance into a song--doesn’t have his own signature style as a guitarist yet, but his ability and command were palpable.

His three-man band could infuse a song with pounding wrathfulness or elevate to hymnal, gospel-based stateliness. Keyboards player Bukka Allen was Moore’s right-hand man both literally and figuratively, coloring songs with swirling gusts from his Hammond organ, along with rolling, jangling blues piano banging a la Leon Russell.

The lanky, long-haired Moore has inherited his stage presence along with his sound, carrying on in the ax-wielding shaman role established by Hendrix and continued by Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Riffs were conjured with the aid of facial grimaces and body English galore, plus the occasional holding aloft of the guitar as if it were a sacred offering or the aiming of it as if it were a weapon. This was flamboyant but not overdone.

Between songs, Moore was as friendly and down to earth as you could wish, proclaiming what a great place the Galaxy is, even though it was less than a third full. Those who did turn out cheered lustily and bestowed several standing ovations, all deserved. Too bad Moore couldn’t have done it before thousands at this weekend’s O.C. Blues Festival in Dana Point. If so, he would never play to an empty nightclub seat in Orange County again.

The second-billed Tea Party is one of today’s what-if bands. What if thBlondie / Gram Parsons were still around (the answers being Rancid / Elastica / Wilco)? The Tea Party, a Canadian trio, is the answer to the question, “What if Jim Morrison, instead of Robert Plant, had fronted Led Zeppelin, and they stuck to all the mystical Zep stuff that used Asian influences?”

The Tea Party’s 50-minute set was a hypnotically effective but not quite involving immersion in mystic moods deftly woven by some heavy yet supple power-trio moves. The trio enhanced its bass-drums-much-distorted-guitar formula with bits on harmonium and santur, a mallet-struck Asian instrument that produced pinging tonalities somewhere between a marimba and a dulcimer.

The set had its purely sensual pleasures, but lyrics that are a bunch of hazy, inflated, mystical hoo-ha, and the droning sameness of those chesty-voiced Doors inflections, kept it from reaching the stature of folklore that deserves to endure. With the Plant / Page tour focusing on the mystical, Eastern-influenced side of Zep, the Tea Party would be an ideal mood-setting opening act.