I suspect I’ve banged on about Howlin Rain so often now that my admiration for the band is reaching mildly stalkerish levels. Last night’s show at the Scala, though, was a big leap on from this one that I frothed over a few months ago. It was good to see them play in front of a bigger crowd, for a start (in this case they were supporting the Meat Puppets, quaintly enough) rather than headlining to a handful of devotees. I think they’ve got a big tour coming up in the States as guests of The Black Crowes, which’ll hopefully get their wonderful music across to a much wider constituency. Not that the Crowes’ fans will necessarily be able to handle Howlin Rain, even if Ethan Miller is drawing from the same wellspring of ‘70s rock as the Robinson brothers. The thing is, Miller invests everything he does with such puppyish, punkish exuberance that his songs never quite stick to classic archetypes. His bandmates are coping better at keeping up with him here, though, especially the mighty Joel Robinow on organ, and the songs from “Magnificent Fiend” are growing new heft and subtlety as a result of being jammed out every night on tour. Even in his Comets On Fire incarnation, it’s hard to remember a better show I’ve seen Ethan play. Wooden Shjips were terrific, too. A quartet from San Francisco, I must admit I’ve slept on their debut album a little, after initially recommending their Myspace sometime last year. I’d remembered them as being heavily indebted to Spacemen 3, maybe a little shoey, but happily, their resemblance to the Spacemen is because they draw so richly on the same motherlode of records. I guess there’s a slight problem here in that they’re one of those bands whose influences are so shamelessly foregrounded: The Doors, Suicide, Neu!, The Velvet Underground, The Stooges. But it’s the way they streamline them all into a kind of rapturous, linear psych that’s so impressive. There’s a collision of sorts between The Exploding Plastic Inevitable and The Family Dog in the way these doggedly hypnotic organ grooves are kept company by a surprisingly jaunty, super-tight rhythm section, then punctuated by Erik Johnson’s reverb-drenched murmurs and his great, stunned, fuzz-heavy guitar solos. Serendipitously, I discovered a new singles comp by them – “Vol 1” – in my post this morning, which is playing as I write. Specifically, “SOL ‘07” is playing, one of the highlights of last night’s show, a needly, insistent head-nodder that stretches out for some ten minutes and features wild flurries of trumpet from the bassist Dusty Jermier. Very handy band, I think. And the organist looks a bit like Bill Clinton if he’d inhaled, or maybe it was just the lights in my eyes from the mirrorball. . .

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.