When people think of the blues, they think of a ragged combo pushing through “Sweet Home Chicago,” or they think of a stoop-shouldered man cradling a guitar and barking the words to “Come on in My Kitchen.” While we can thank blues purists for these rather limiting stereotypes, we should also be able to understand their motives: There’s a phenomenal power in the music that emerged from the Delta blues performers of the ’30s and the urban blues bands of the ’50s. The songs of Skip James, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf didn’t just provide a window into black American culture—they bared the human spirit, with its confluence of lust, dignity, pain, and perseverance. Their work has a primal immediacy rarely found in other forms of musical expression.

:And yet we must recognize that the blues is so much more. Louis Armstrong, for one, said he played the blues; so did Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. Even though these men were jazz musicians, they recognized that their music contained the basic patterns of the blues. The same could be said of Jimmie Rodgers, Bill Monroe, and Hank Williams, all of whom drew heavily on the blues for their unique styles; so did Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley. In other words, all of these men shaped the blues to fit their backgrounds, their personalities, their voices, and their visions.

As a genre, the blues has always been more comprehensive than any of its defining moments, and it has always been capable of more power and more surprise than we’ve been led to think. That’s what makes the music of new bands such as the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion so exciting. Spencer, however, doesn’t garner much airplay on radio programs devoted to the blues, and it’s hard to imagine a conventional blues band covering one of his tunes. That’s because his music is a purposely messy, irreverent take on old blues themes—the kind of music that makes most purists turn up their noses, just as they’ve done in the past with the music of the Rolling Stones, the Stooges, and the Gun Club.

Snobbish assertions aside, Spencer is a blues innovator for the ’90s. His band is the best-known proponent of the marriage between punk and blues currently gaining favor in the rock underground. At their best, these blues revisionists present a funkier, nastier sound than today’s garden-variety alternative rock bands. If Weezer is a mid-’90s version of Herman’s Hermits, then groups like Delta 72 and Chrome Chranks are the decade’s Yardbirds and Doors. Their appeal is dirtier, darker, more dangerous-sounding, and ultimately more exciting.

The Blues Explosion, which appears Thursday at 328 Performance Hall, anchors its ferocious guitar rock in the rawest of blues rhythms. Abrasive and impudent, frontman Spencer doesn’t bother to shape grooves into conventional songs; instead, he forges ahead on repetitive, disjointed rhythms that rarely converge into choruses. At times it sounds as though this trio is trying to capture the wickedness of James Brown’s extended jams but without the foundation of a bass player or the additional sweetening of a horn section.

On Now I Got Worry, Spencer plays the wise-ass, giving voice to his characteristic smarter-than-you attitude through screams and rants. We aren’t meant to take his one-dimensional vocal clowning too seriously, though, as his tirades are run through heavy distortion—he sounds like he’s shouting through a bullhorn in one song, through a pocket AM radio on the next. The vocals occasionally coalesce into a forceful sonic presence, as on the funky anarchism of “Fuck Shit Up,” but for the most part, they’re all grunting and shouting, a merely exclamatory instrument.

At the core of the music, instead, is the telepathic interplay between Spencer, second guitarist Judah Bauer, and drummer Russell Simins. The band combines one-note riffs and rumbling grooves with unpredictable stops and turns. At times, the feedback and tin-can drums reach the hip-shaking immediacy of Beck’s funky studio collages, while at others they transform into an endless voodoo groove, like Canned Heat on a particularly twisted bender. The Blues Explosion’s music is physical and exhilarating, all the more so for its demented belligerence and purposeful formlessness.

Spencer has cited Hound Dog Taylor’s Houserockers as an influence, along with Robert Johnson, Charlie Feathers, Charley Patton, and modern-day Mississippi bluesmen Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside. He also mentions early Rolling Stones (apparent in several guitar riffs), Jerry Lee Lewis (for his fuck-all stage manner), and, perhaps most importantly, Crypt Records’ Back From the Grave garage-rock compilations.

Most instrumental in all these influences, though, is R.L. Burnside, who opens Thursday’s concert. The band hit its apex backing the 70-year-old Mississippi bluesman on A Ass Pocket Full of Whiskey, released earlier this year. On record, Burnside gives the band the weighty wallop that it has lacked in the past. He does so not through his authenticity but through the gruff urgency in his voice; he has the natural mannerisms and inherent earthiness that Spencer lacks. While the Blues Explosion strains to sound fierce and hard-boiled, Burnside comes by it honestly.

Which isn’t to say that Spencer’s music doesn’t pack its own special wallop. Indeed, the Blues Explosion’s debut three years ago seems to have precipitated an outburst of noisy blues bands. New York’s Chrome Cranks and Northern California’s Dura-Delinquent sound as much like the Cramps as they do the Blues Explosion, but they share a similar disregard for well-formed tunes: As with Now I Got Worry, Dura-Delinquent’s self-titled debut and Chrome Cranks’ Dead Cool LP and Love in Exile EP value groove and forward movement over formal song structure.

Chrome Cranks tend to slow the tempos down for a darker texture that resembles the early work of the Doors. Singer Peter Aaron is an archly dramatic performer whose tortured vocals recall those of the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce. He also proves a commanding ability to mimic David Johansen’s testifying style on “Way-Out Lover,” especially when he steps forward with his Brooklyn accent to shout, “Oh, you know it’s true!”

The snotty decadence of the New York Dolls also runs through the music of Dura-Delinquent, a group that accentuates sleaze and smeared glamour on its Echostatic Records debut. As the titles “Amphetamine Queen” and “I Could Kick Your Habit” suggest, the band is reviving the content as well as the thunder of the Dolls. But the Delinquents lack the same pop sense and instrumental abandon—they sound like they’re straining to stay together, rather than speeding recklessly toward a crash. Their hearts are in the right place, however, and they have the potential to develop into an interesting group.

Meanwhile, the Makeup and Delta 72, both from Washington, D.C., lean more on an organ-based R&B sound; both bands have hard-swinging drummers who play with raunchy, complex drive. The Makeup is the looser and the more entertaining of the two. The group’s debut LP, Destination Love: Live! at Cold Rice, opens with a sermon about “the new breed for the new flood” and “liberation theology for the untouchable sounds.” The band then slips into an amateurish Meters-style groove, while singer Ian Svenonius alternates between psychodramatic cries and kitschy, scripted testimonials. With carefully sculpted hairdos and matching black silk stagewear, it’s easy to imagine that this band would be a gas live. Destination Love, however, is a spirited mess for people who enjoy listening to glorious, one-of-a-kind accidents.

Delta 72, on the other hand, shows more expertise on its tightly focused The R&B of Membership. The band is just as interested in motivating a dance floor as the Makeup or the Blues Explosion, but of its many blues-influenced peers, this quartet displays the most precision and the highest level of craft. To its credit, Delta 72 maintains a punkish energy and a cheeky looseness, but it pays much more attention to creating songs.

For what it’s worth, though, all bands could care less about permanency and professionalism. They’re more interested in raising a ruckus than leaving a legacy. It’s an old philosophy that Goethe stated centuries ago: “A person remains of consequence not so far as he leaves something behind him, but so far as he acts and enjoys and rouses others to action and enjoyment.” Much the same thing could be said of the many bluesmen of yore: Whether we remember their names, we’re constantly reminded of their lasting impact.