Like much of New Orleans, Astral Project has the blues. Blue Streak is its first studio album since Katrina, and the compositions are their reactions to the storm and life after it. In Steve Masakowski’s case, that means pieces that are fairly directly triggered by events and frustrations; in Tony Dagradi’s, it means a suite of compositions that explore the blues as a form and a concept. Nothing is cheaply emotional or melodramatic, and only the elegiac closer “Fallen” is simply, obviously read as a post-Katrina composition. The others don’t mask their origins, but they don’t trace back as easily.

Masakowski, for instance, plays a semi-circular guitar figure that seems to chase its tail in the appropriately named “Entropy,” and the lumbering second line “Once Was” features a sax melody line that recalls a number of classic parade melodies without quoting any of them. On the other hand, James Singleton’s title “Dike Finger” connects clearly to levees, but nothing in the mood or composition is as obviously rooted in the experience. Still, it’s of a piece with the rest of Blue Streak as a reflection of this place and this time because it rolls through three or four distinct moods over the course of 10 minutes. By some residents’ standards, that would be considered stable.

For me, “Dike Finger” is where the album takes off, where the gestures toward genre are more allusive and the compositions offer the group more room to move. The elegant “Angel Song” is punctuated by two sighing lines, one that ascends and one that descends, and variations on them filter through the track, either as part of the solo or as part of the support.

Part of the magic of an Astral Project album is that nothing sounds like magic. After 30 years together, everything sounds effortless and no individual musical statement leaves the mood or musical vocabulary of the piece. In that sense, nothing is spectacular, but these days in this place, perhaps the most encouraging sound is one of a functioning community, not individual greatness.