The Hold Steady: all about the party, and what comes after

New York City rock group the Hold Steady is the American partyer's ambassador to the world. New album "Stay Positive" is another portrait, and maybe the band's best yet, of its everyday subjects' soaring highs and crushing lows.

The five-piece (Bobby Drake, drums; Craig Finn, guitar/vocals; Tad Kubler, lead guitar; Franz Nicolay, keyboards/accordion/harmonica; Galen Polivka, bass guitar) plays Saturday at the Capitol Hill Block Party stage at the intersection of Broadway and 10th Avenue (9 p.m. on the Main Stage).

Critics love the band because of its clever compliant/subversive songwriting formula. The music goes one way, the lyrics go the other. It's something that reached a new peak on the 2006 album "Boys and Girls in America" and is even more pronounced on "Stay Positive."

The Hold Steady boils sleeveless T-shirts, cutoff jeans and scuffed shoes down to dumb, awesome American rock essence. It sounds like stuff you've heard before, the fun music you might make if, say, you're from Spokane, and grew up on Boston and Bon Jovi.

Cliché party music serves two purposes for the band. It's easy to rock out to (a typical Hold Steady song can be ably air-guitar-ed on first listen). But it also contrasts the band's ulterior motive — honestly answering the question, "What happens to the party people after the party is over?"

Deep, dark reality.

In the world of the Hold Steady, that means codependent relationships. That means substance abuse. About three-fourths of the Hold Steady's music — the quarter that's not about the exultant party — is about these abuses.

This reality is what gifted writer and love-or-hate vocalist (he sing-shouts) Finn testifies to.

On "Stay Positive" track "Lord I'm Discouraged," wondering about the private drug horrors of a former dance partner, he expresses love in a pawnshop gesture ("I'm almost busted, but I bought back the jewelry she sold"). The Hold Steady sometimes goes on straight-up nostalgia trips, but when Finn gets into describing high-school summer parties (on "Constructive Summer" he asks that God "Grant us all the power to drink on top of water towers"), the junkie girl is felt there, too, years before things went dreadfully wrong, and suddenly the nostalgia isn't all warm.

Some are named and some not, but the characters in "Stay Positive," if not all the Hold Steady's albums, populate the same world, having once populated the same party.

Smarty art people like the Hold Steady's use of irony and literariness. Party people, reformed and not, like the Hold Steady because they represent reality, and that's more the point.

To catch the quintet at the Capitol Hill Block Party will be to see them in their natural habitat: Party central. To walk up and down the Capitol Hill alleys hours after the Block Party is finished will be to see what the songs are about.

Andrew Matson: 206-464-2153

or amatson@seattletimes.com