Ready, steady, go: the Brooklyn rock quartet aren't holding back. photo: Statia Molenski The Hold Steady April 24 at 8:30 Mercury Lounge 217 East Houston Street 212-260-4700 more nyclife most popular most commented The Daddy Diaries: Hot Sex in the Golden Years La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Estrellita Poblana III Counter Culture by Robert Sietsema Express Deli and Restaurant Fork in the Road by Sarah DiGregorio Al Green Samples Some New Producers Summer Guide by Mikael Wood Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

Finn has been donning this particular tux for nearly a decade, penning wordy tales of gnarly nightlife lowlifes, first with Minneapolis pile drivers Lifter Puller and now with the Hold Steady. Accompanied by fellow Lifter Tad Kuebler on lead guitar, bassist Galen Polivka, and drummer Judd Counsell, Finn still writes lyrics like "Pills and powders baby, powders and pills/We spent the night last night in Beverly Hills/There was this chick that looked like Beverly Sills/We got killed" ("The Swish"). And he still delivers them onstage like your 10th-grade shop teacher gone off his meds while the band bashes away behind him.

Lifter Puller's final proper album, 2000's Fiestas + Fiascos (last year's Soft Rock collected nearly everything else the band recorded), was a half-hour epic of deceit, wanton drug abuse, and murder set against a backdrop of nightclubs and raves. But Finn hopes to make the moral tone of his seedy tales a bit more explicit this time around. "I'm trying to keep things more positive—I don't want it just to be 'party, party, party.' People should know I'm not advocating anything."

"I remember three kids on Ecstasy came up to Craig one night in Minneapolis," says Kuebler, "going, 'Look, we're all fucked up!' And Craig was like, 'Dude, don't you have to work in the morning?' I always thought of that album as an example of how not to behave."

The Hold Steady came together last fall when Finn, who'd moved to Brooklyn following Lifter Puller's late-2000 breakup, was asked by friends from the comedy troupe Mr. Ass to be their Paul Shaffer. "Like, if there was a Vietnam skit, the band would go into 'White Rabbit,' " says Finn. He enlisted Kuebler, who'd recently moved to Brooklyn after a stint in the Minneapolis band Song of Zarathustra, and Counsell and Polivka, formerly the rhythm section of Milwaukee-to-Minneapolis-to-New York transplants Punchdrunk. "We'd be learning covers, like 'Shout at the Devil,' and Tad was like, 'Oh, you play it like this.' We all came up on classic rock, so it gave us a really good basis as a band."

That classic-rock feel pervades the Hold Steady's material. Counsell is a more dramatic, less groove-oriented drummer than LP's Dan Monick, and the Hold Steady move more deliberately, winding the musical tension tighter. The songs are also structurally looser. "We've recorded six songs fairly recently, and in total they're three minutes shorter than all of Fiestas, which has 12 songs," says Finn. "It's less claustrophobic. With Lifter Puller it would be like, 'This happens twice, that happens three times,' but with the Hold Steady, it's more like, 'OK, when I stop singing, play a guitar solo.' So," he smiles, "this band has much more of a chance of bombing."

"Let's do that," says Polivka with a grin. "If we're gonna fail, let's do it completely."