First, a couple of lyrics (and God knows, there are plenty to quote on the Hold Steady’s fourth album). From the opening song, “Constructive Summer”: “Let this be my annual reminder that we can all be something bigger.” From the last song, “Slapped Actress”, repeated by Craig Finn while the music swells and a rabble choir add “woah-oh”s: “Man, we make our own movies.” I’ve spent the weekend, amongst other things, bewitched by “Stay Positive”, and a few details are starting to come into focus. On the second play, it becomes apparent that this is another superb and compelling album by The Hold Steady, one whose complexity and anthemic punch might yet surpass “Boys And Girls In America”. An initial hunch that this is a record about being in a band in your late thirties – a hunch backed up by some of Finn’s early pronouncements about the album – proves to be only partially true. “Stay Positive” is a whole lot more complicated than that. As far as I can tell this morning, “Stay Positive” is a series of fragmented narratives that revisit old characters (though Holly and Charlemagne, for two, are never named) and generate new plots, involving one or maybe two murders, visions of the Virgin Mary, fights in the woods, something about crucifixions and so on. Fans of the first two Hold Steady albums will be pleased to see that Catholicism is forcibly back on Finn’s agenda, tangled up inexorably with sex: “If I cross myself when I come would you maybe receive me?” he pleads in “Yeah Sapphire”. But the protagonists sometimes seem a bit older than they were. People are dying, people are starting to think they can be “something bigger”. There’s a suspicion, in “Joke About Jamaica”, that there are more dignified things to do with a life than hang around rock bands when you’re no longer the youngest ones on the scene. And juxtaposed with this, there’s Finn trying to find dignity in actually being in a band at 37, finally finding success at an age when most aspiring bands have given up trying. “The kids at our shows will have kids of their own,” he notes in the title track, “The singalong songs will be our scriptures.” Consequently, it’s possible to pick multiple paths through this fascinating record, as Finn artfully mixes up the grimy narratives; the optimism, nostalgia and pathos; the religious, sexual and rock’n’roll documentary imagery. You sense, too, that he’s grappling with the obligation to be ‘real’ and to provide a great performance, to tell stories that have meaning but that aren’t always in some sense truthful – hence the denouement when he talks about making movies, shortly after noting, “Some nights it’s entertainment and some other nights it’s just work.” I could write about this all day, and still struggle to unpick Finn’s thinking entirely. But anyway, it’s obviously not just the lyrics that make “Stay Positive” so rich. The anthems are bigger, the range wider, the cascading E-Street piano lines more prevalent and vivid. “Constructive Summer” might reference “St Joe Strummer”, but its clearest antecedents seem to be Husker Du and REM circa “Little America”. “Sequestered In Memphis” has a trumpet-led chorus that is the catchiest thing they’ve ever written. The much-vaunted musical departures begin with “One For The Cutters”, kicked off by a florid harpsichord line, but more striking is “Navy Sheets”, where a niggling synth hook cuts through a dense spiel that harks back to “Separation Sunday”. Patterson Hood guests on this one, but the influence of The Drive-By Truckers seems to hover over “Both Crosses”, a bloodshot and twanging meditation that seems kin to something from “The Dirty South”. My favourite this morning is “Joke About Jamaica”, something of a key to the meaning of the whole album I think, with flurries of grand piano and stuttery Hammond tracking Finn in a way that reminds me a lot of Elvis Costello & The Attractions circa “Trust” – “Clubland” specifically, perhaps. Eventually, the grandest and most preposterous of Tad Kubler’s mighty solos turns into a squalling talkbox workout. And once “Slapped Actress” finishes off, “back in Ybor City again”, with its stirring chorale, it’s clear that The Hold Steady have made another record that is at once immediate and reflective, that can provide massive live celebrations and intimate close study. There’s a lot to get your teeth into here, trust me. . .

I couldn’t make it to Howlin Rain’s London show the other night, but my colleague Miles did, and came back impressed and bearing a very neat new CD that he bought at the gig. “Wild Life” has two tracks, lasts for about half an hour, and may provide some succour for Ethan Miller fans who’ve been unnerved by his transition from the flat-out psychedelic gloop of Comets On Fire to the sepia-tinted classic rock of the Rain. Essentially, “Wild Life” operates in the space between Comets and Howlin Rain, fairly logically since the line-up for the session is split between the two bands: Joel Robinow, the terrific keyboard player, and bassist Ian Gradek from Howlin Rain; Ben Chasny and drummer Utrillo Kushner from Comets, amongst other things of course. Together, they make a tumultuous old racket, with “Wild Life” itself being a gloriously smoked blues anchored by Robinow’s organ. It is, apparently, a Wings-era Paul McCartney song, though my general ignorance of that stuff beyond “Wonderful Christmas Time” (a record that I contend is genuinely avant-garde, but I’ll save that lunatic digression for another time) means I’ve no idea how much the original sounds like a severely freaked Humble Pie. I’m suspecting not, but this is awesome, and it’s fantastic to hear Miller back jousting with the prickly, smudged playing of Chasny while Robinow channels Brian Auger. “Black Sangria”, meanwhile, is, and I quote from the sleevenotes, “A completely improvised piece” that flits all over the place at high speed, thanks in no small part to the mighty Kushner’s skittering beats. A distinct whiff of Latin rock here (I’m faintly reminded of Santana, and even something by The Mars Volta, of all people), though the general vibe is of wandering into an unusually agitated Grateful Dead bootleg. Which is obviously fine by me. Sixteen minutes, 28 seconds seems a bit stingy, mind. Anyway, this one is on some label called Three Lobed that I’ve never encountered before, and is definitely worth tracking down. In the interim, you could also do worse than head over to When You Awake, where there’s an excellent Ethan Miller comp to download titled “Rock Salt and Nails: A Country Voodoo Mixtape”. Much pleasure to be had here, as Miller plots a course through The Rolling Stones, Earth, Charlie Manson, the intriguing Exuma, Cher, Lindsey Buckingham and so on, and there are copious sleevenotes from Miller which prove that his prose style is as vivid and impassioned as his guitar playing. Weirdly, the track we’ve been hammering is an early take on “Madman Across The Water” by Elton John, someone who I’ve previously had zero time for, to be honest. Here, though, John uncharacteristically cedes the spotlight to a guesting Mick Ronson, who spends the best part of nine minutes soloing his taskmaster into the ground. Trust me on this one; even if you hate Elton, give it a go.

Taking a well-earned break from the MP3s of new Oasis songs that seem to be whizzing around the Uncut and NME offices today, there are a couple of folkish new albums from British singers that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. One is “The Fox’s Wedding” by Sharron Kraus, which begins with a ripple of bells, pipes and eldritch drones. Kraus clearly knows her way around the creepier end of the acid-folk scene (no surprise, perhaps, that the album is out on David Tibet’s Durtro Jnana imprint), and there are some tremendously witchy ululations at the climax of that excellent first track, “Brigid”. Fairies dance with Kraus, while she dreams of “ancient sacrifice”. Mercifully, though, Kraus avoids wandering into the gothic hinterlands that this stuff can lead to. The heady medieval air reminds me inevitably of Shirley & Dolly Collins, though there’s something of Anne Briggs in there, too. Her closest contemporaries, I guess, would be Espers, perhaps that lovely solo album which Meg Baird released last year. At first, I felt that “The Fox’s Wedding” was a nice exercise in atmospheres: highly seductive aesthetics, for sure, but I wasn’t sure about the ultimate calibre of Kraus’ tunes. It’s become, though, an album I’ve returned to over these past few weeks, and those songs have come into much firmer, compelling firmness – terrific songs like “In The Middle Of Summer”, which has an airy tang that reminds me of a mossy Joni Mitchell. Alexander Tucker’s “Portal” has been another steady grower of late. I’ve been aware of him since he fronted a post-hardcore band called Unhome who I was tangentially acquainted with a few years ago. Equating that earnest bawling singer with the hirsute guitar mystic and Jackie O Motherfucker affiliate, intently looping his riffs into a great quilt of noise, was initially pretty hard. Tucker’s first couple of albums were called, appositely enough, “Old Fog” and “Furrowed Brow”. “Portal”, however, pushes Tucker’s voice back into the foreground, as if he’s finally re-emerging from some sonic undergrowth. Now, faintly, it’s possible to spot a path back to hardcore: someone here even suggested the other day, weirdly, that one of the songs reminded her – melodically, I think - of the Foo Fighters. I wasn’t immediately convinced by this return to more conspicuous songs, not least because Tucker’s current voice can be rather thin and self-consciously portentous. As an experimental musician finding affinities between, say, Six Organs Of Admittance and Fennesz, he was pretty impressive. But trying to do that and be a more accessible singer-songwriter? Not so sure. Again, though, I’m beginning to reassess “Portal”, chiefly thanks to a naggingly beautiful song called “Veins To The Sky”, which I think ATP may be releasing as some kind of single. I don’t want to go off on that tedious rant about mimsy new shoegazers yet again, but here’s a song which successfully throws a song into a meticulously disorienting, blissed environment, albeit one which draws on the ancient songcraft of folk musicians far more than any run-of-the-mill indie. It’s a terrific and persistent song, and there are some other very pleasing, droning, hypnotic things on the album. He’s great live, too.