HAIL the return of literate American rock on a pair of albums cooked up from books.

The Hold Steady's sophomore release - and their first in Britain - takes its title from a line in Jack Kerouac's beat novel On The Road that "boys and girls in America have such a sad time together".

"Basically the songs are about guys and girls and love," says singer and lyricist Craig Finn.

More specifically, they are about guys and girls, drugs and more drugs in teenage wasteland tales of losers and lovers, dope fiends and wasted party people, suicide and gambling.

Fuelled on Springsteen's Born To Run and margueritas, The Hold Steady race through 40 minutes of human wreckage, the twin guitars as fiery as Husker Du, the ragged stoner tales the stuff of Tom Waits vignettes and Larry Clark movies.

So, just who are The Hold Steady? From Brooklyn via Minneapolis, this garage band of mid-30s blokes look bookish and anonymous but their blistered blues rock is anything but.

The Decemberists are a more arch, oddball enterprise, dressing themselves in Edwardian rig and their nouveau antique songs in trad folk, Irish jiggery, blissful 12-string pop and mad prog rock.

The experimental Portland quintet weave their fourth album around the Japanese folk fable of The Crane Wife, as songwriter and frontman Colin Meloy brings whimsy, melody and florid imagination to murder ballads, sea shanties, American civil war strife and fated romances. Oh for a British band to be so bold.


The Hold Steady play Fibbers, York, on February 20