BY JENNIFER KELLY/ PHOTOS BY OLIVER SCOTT SNURE

The first time I saw the Hold Steady it was at a bar just outside Fenway Park, with maybe 30 other people, in a show that was held off for hours in the hope that timing it with the end of the baseball game would boost the numbers a bit. I was sitting there at the bar the whole time, leafing through the Phoenix, drinking a beer, probably three feet away from the clump of them, with no inkling that they were a band at all, let alone one that might become the best live band in America. I saw them almost by accident. (I was really there to see Runner & the Thermodynamics, who were also really good, but you've probably never heard of them)

But the main thing is that that night, in the sketchiest of venues, in the very epicenter of Hostile, Massachusetts, the Hold Steady slayed. Finn seemed like a powder keg, dancing side to side, gesturing wildly, slapping himself in his excitement, and spouting the most intricate self-referencing poetry about wasted kids and killer parties. His band slammed out homage to Lizzy and Zeppelin and Queen and AC/DC, with big power chords and dead stops and the kind of riffs that start like diesel trains, chugging a couple of times before they pick up the whole song and carry it away. I bought  Almost Killed Me on the way out, and it became one of my favorites. A couple of years later Separation Sunday, following the same cast of bedraggled characters, was even better...a big serious rock album that was, at the same time, a lot of fun. The hype wave caught under them.  By the time I saw them again, every kid in the front row knew all the words to all the songs.

And, you know, I kind of lost interest. As their sound got more conventionally rock, the albums seemed to get bigger and less interesting. I paid only passing attention to Boys and Girls in America and skipped Stay Positive altogether. And while my back was turned, the band churned its sing-along songs into massive crowd hits, what might have begun as a riff on classic rock became the thing itself. They opened for the Rolling Stones at one point, and it made perfect sense.

Fast forward a couple of years, and the Hold Steady are playing Northampton, a home town for Finn, in a sense, since his parents were married there and he himself was baptized in a church just down the street from Pearl Street. It's a packed, sweaty show, especially towards the front, and it quickly becomes clear that what flattens out and becomes too easy on recent Hold Steady records works pretty brilliantly in concert. This is one of the best shows I've been to in a long time.  

It starts with the Oranges Band, the Baltimore-based pop punk band headed by Roman Kuebler, a horn-rimmed collegiate type who once played bass in Spoon. (This is the night for nebbishy guys in glasses.)  His band looks a little more rock. Skinny Dave Voyles sits in back, pounding out the straight-up beat, and Pat Martin, the bass player, has long hair and elaborate tattoos on both arms, which you can see because he's wearing a muscle tee.  

The music, too, is an uneasy mix of nervy, nerdy post-punk and uncomplicated rock. Kuebler's voice quavers in wide vibrato, like Glenn Mercer on the first Feelies album or Jonathan Richman anytime, while the band pounds and pummels underneath. They play a good smattering from the new album in what Kuebler calls the "Oranges Band Are Invisible Rock Block," an alternate history of Baltimore's rock scene. "Ottobar After Hours" is a big, hard-charging power rocker, with some surprisingly old fashioned guitar shreddery tucked into the middle. (The guitarist must have heard some Eddie Van Halen when he was little.)  Other cuts pitting Who-like windmills against Kuebler's ironic and tremulous voice, scrubs and scratches and scrambles of guitar against the lucid resolution of power chords. "It's like rock ‘n roll only weird," Kuebler explains, deadpan, in a break between songs, and yes, that's one way to put it. They close with something about sharks with a huge, sing-along chorus of "who-o-o-o", which is just an inkling of the audience participation about to erupt on stage.

Because then it's the Hold Steady's turn, and Finn starts out, right away, by turning the mic to the audience and letting them shout out the first lines to "Hornets! Hornets!":  "She says always remember never to trust me," a good three-quarters of the audience knows this stuff cold, "she said that the first night that she met me...she said there's gonna come a time when I'm gonna have to go with whoever's gonna get me the highest."  And then the band comes in with those enormous guitar chords, those sludgy, rubbery bass lines, bobbing and weaving in the sheer density of the sound. Finn, once he takes over singing duties, is in effervescent form, grinning madly, acting out the song with broad, almost parodic gestures, and holding a kind of manic PeeWee Herman glee just barely in check. There's a moment in this song where he turns back and faces off with Tad Kubler for the twining, cartwheeling guitar parts near the end, the best part of the song.

The Hold Steady have a new album, Heaven Is Whenever coming out this May on Vagrant, so a good portion of the set is devoted to new material. "Hurricane J" follows "Hornets!", its bouncy, punky pogo beat lifting everybody in the band, and eventually, most of the audience into an exuberant up-and-down hop. The Hold Steady is a band that sets up inexorable rhythms just to break them, that pummels and pushes and then, just when you're used to that, comes to a dead stop. There's one of these, every instrument swinging down in a giant chord, complete silence, and then Finn admitting "See I don't think that I'm the guy."  It's this combination of bravado and vulnerability, of balls-out rock and nerdy over-thinking that make the Hold Steady great, and if they've tipped a little towards the macho side lately, they haven't tipped all the way.

Then it's the "Swish," the monster song from their first album, with buzzsaw riff, its huge guitar builds, and its great throwaway lyrics about Robbie Robertson, and Nina Simone, and UPCs dialed into the system. Finn lets the audience have the best lines, stopping and turning his mic outward for the front five rows to shout into, even the final, definitive line at the end (are Finn's best lines always at the end?). "Swishing through the city center, I did a couple of favors for these guys who looked like Tuskan Raiders." 

Then it's "Magazines" from Stay Positive, and right after that, another new song, called "Weekenders," which seems on the surface to be a real departure. You see, it's not unusual to hear traces of Sweet or Queen or Cheap Trick or Thin Lizzy or AC/DC in the Hold Steady's songs. You just don't look for Joy Division. But here it is, a four-thumping, guitar luminous darkness at the beginning of the new song, a self-deprecating lyric about how "I never was your first choice/I think I was the last one maybe". Yet even here the moments of vulnerability are annihilated by an onslaught of guitars, buried under crowd-melding bouts of rock ‘n' roll hedonism.

The rest of the set is mostly forward looking with a handful more songs from the upcoming disc ("Soft in the Center," "Rock Problems," and in the encore "Barely Breathing"), a bunch from Stay Positive, a few each from Separation Sunday and Boys & Girls. Only Almost Killed Me gets slighted. "The Swish" is the only one from the first album. For "Lord I'm Discouraged," Kubler breaks out a double-neck guitar, coaxing the lyrical opening out of the 12-string half and banging out the rougher, later chords on the six-string below.  Dan Neustadt, who has taken over for the departed Franz Nicolay at keyboards is hard to hear (as is Finn a lot of time), but je seems to be a pretty good replacement.

The regular set closes with two from Stay Positive, on the evidence, the band's most conventionally rock statement so far. "Sequestered in Memphis" turns the room into a giant karaoke bar, the group-sung choruses hanging in the rafters as the crowd surges toward the stage. By this point, the boys in front are mirroring every one of Finn's gestures. If he points at you, you point at him. If he claps in double time, you clap in double-time. It must be a powerful feeling.  "Slapped Actress" closes and, if anything, takes it up a notch.

For the encore, the band pulls out another new song, the bizarrely offbeated, cabaret-ish "Barely Breathing", and then two huge old ones, "You're Little Hoodrat Friend" from Separation Sunday and "Stay Positive" from the album of the same name. This final song is maybe the band's most crowd-rallying ever, with its irresistible who-o-o-o chorus and its insistent melodic lift. It sounds too easy on the record, but live it's a monster and one more reason why you should see the Hold Steady if you get the chance, even if you think you've outgrown them.

Oh, and by the way, I bought Stay Positive on the way out. The more things change, the more they stay the same.