Echoes from the past filter through Smog’s melancholy

IF the current generation’s Americana singer-songwriters are the lower-key alt-country descendants of the ‘70s country outlaws, then Smog’s leader, Bill Callahan, may have become the scene’s Willie Nelson. And not just because Callahan moved last year to Austin from Chicago and recorded Smog’s latest album, “A River Ain’t Too Much to Love,” at Nelson’s Texas studio, or because he played a Nelson-like nylon-string acoustic guitar Tuesday at the Knitting Factory.

It’s the epic impressionism and musical elasticity of the new material that this night seemed genetically linked to such contemplative early-’70s Nelson albums as “Red Headed Stranger” -- though perhaps filtered through Camus’ “The Stranger,” as Callahan played out the inner conflicts that have been his hallmark for a dozen albums.

Melancholy songs flowed and meandered like the river of the album title, the boyish-looking baritone stone-faced and stone-voiced whether musing on family and reconciliation (the poetic, solipsistic “Rock Bottom Riser”) or the evergreen twin topics, love and death (“Say Valley Maker”). Guitarist Jason Dezember, bassist Colleen Burke and especially drummer Jim White (of Australian band the Dirty Three) fashioned musical equivalents of the words’ tensions -- the harrowing “Blood Flows” built a droning intensity recalling the Doors’ “The End.”

No one would mistake this for a Willie Nelson concert, but Callahan’s compelling spirit seems very much kindred.