Still in love with rock-and-roll

'I don't feel like rock-and-roll, if you look at it commercially, is in a great spot right now," says the Hold Steady's Craig Finn. "I don't think 20-year-olds in college dorms are cranking rock all the time. So in some ways, to go out there and make the biggest rock noise you can feels like a defiant gesture at this moment. It feels pretty good, too."

The Hold Steady makes a big rock noise on Teeth Dreams, the Brooklyn band's sixth album. They are regulars at the XPoNential Festival, which this year offers healthy doses of straight-up rock-and-roll from, among others, Philly's Dave Hause, the Old 97's from Austin, Texas, and J. Roddy Walston & the Business from Cleveland, Tenn.

From the start, with 2004's Almost Killed Me, the Hold Steady was a great bar band, and Finn's detailed, empathetic tales of down-and-out drinkers, troubled Catholic school kids, and rock-and-roll refugees have always balanced the tragedy and triumph that can accompany Saturday-night excess. "Once you're out there everything's possible / There might be a fight, there might be a miracle," he sings in "Spinners" on the new album.

But while the stories usually depict, without glorification, destructive behaviors and poor decisions, the big rock riffs lend the characters grandeur and dignity.

Finn cribbed the title of Teeth Dreams from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and "the lyrics deal a lot with anxiety and claustrophobia and sort of the nervousness of this age," he says. The Hold Steady's fist-pumping, singalong choruses, however, revel in the communal power of rock-and-roll. "There's celebration in that, even if the lyrics have that melancholy to it," Finn says.

Rock-and-roll may not be at the center of pop music as it once was, but Finn hopes it can sound more like a "call to arms" than something nostalgic.

"I don't mean to be like an old man yelling, 'Get off of my lawn!', but I grew up on rock-and-roll and I'm still very much in love with it," he says.

- Steve Klinge