The first time I saw the Hold Steady get up onstage, I literally laughed at how geeky they looked. These guys definitely did not resemble a rock band; in their alligator shirts and slacks, they seemed more like a pickup softball team of tipsy paralegals. They were opening for Les Savy Fav in Brooklyn, nearly five years ago, and they cracked me up just plugging in. They started to play a positive jam about American history, and I laughed harder. Then they did a song about a girl who doesn’t feel too sweet about the places she has to go to get some sleep. I wasn’t laughing now. Craig Finn spluttered to himself, making the sign of the cross between choruses, while Tad Kubler played gung-ho beer-commercial riffs with truly appalling enthusiasm. Thirty seconds into “Killer Parties,” I had a new favorite band, and they’ve  kept rolling ever since, banging out four great albums in five years. They still crack me up just plugging in.

Stay Positive is the first album you could describe as your typical Hold Steady record. It has everything you’d expect God’s bar band to bring to the party: drugs, dirt, dementia, Catholic damage, greasy-fries guitar­, over-the-top keyboards, a singer gossiping about doomed friends he doesn’t bother­ to introduce. These Brooklyn-via-Minneapolis dudes mix the cheesiest classic rock with the trashiest punk, saluting Joe Strummer and Joe Walsh at the same time, with Finn’s word-drunk motormouth poetry on top. They revel in jokes that echo from song to song, characters who show up album after album (Gideon? Holly? Charlemagne? Who are these kids?), local references most of us can only pretend to get, especially if we’re not from the Midwest. Like Axl Rose, they know how to end a song with a lethal one-liner. (My favorite: “I did a couple favors for some guys who looked like Tusken Raiders.”) But they also know how to tell a sad story, in Bruce Springsteen territory. If “Killer Parties” was “The Promised Land” without promises or land, “You Can Make Him Like You” was “Candy’s Room” without candy or a room.

According to my iPod, I’ve played the new “Sequestered in Memphis” 38 times in the last 24 hours, but I’m still trying to figure it out. The Hold Steady goof on the groovy ’70s-radio rock they sincerely admire, with a not-remotely-ironic horn ­section (welcome to Miller time!) and a hairy organ solo (whoa, Schlitz does rock America!), yet you can tell it’s them before the vocal even starts. Like most Hold Steady songs about women, it’s friendly yet deeply confused, and shockingly, it starts in a bar. Finn confesses, “We didn’t go back to her place/We went to some place where she cat sits”—most bands would build a whole verse if not an entire song around a detail like that, but here it’s just another frazzled memory in a story Finn’s having trouble telling the same way twice. It’s the least word-heavy thing they’ve ever done, and there’s a lazy grin in the melody; it all sounds laid-back, and since I hate music that is laid-back, or even lying at a semi-backward angle, I’m a little disgusted at how brilliant this is.

Stay Positive is their loving parody of the ’80s straight-edge hardcore youth-unity anthems they grew up on. “Constructive Summer” and “Stay Positive” blatantly evoke the days when punk bands like SS Decontrol did anti-smoking rants (“Don’t you dare steal my air/Because I care”) and Crucial Youth were chanting “Four Rules” (“Be straight, don’t be late/Bench your weight, don’t masturbate”). The Hold Steady love to take the piss out of hardcore, with their gags about “unifying the scene” and “all-ages ­hardcore matinee shows.” But when Finn begins the album with the mock-Fugazi motto, “Let this be my annual reminder that we could all be something bigger,” part of the joke is that he’s not joking.

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