Album: The Hold Steady, A Positive Rage (Rough Trade)

Packaged with a DVD documentary, this live album captures The Hold Steady just at the moment they were about to graduate from cult status to Next Big Thing after their breakthrough Boys & Girls in America, when virtually every song was about hoodrat kids getting wasted at killer parties.

It's an exhilarating show in front of an obviously partisan Chicago audience, the group blasting away hell for leather, with at times gauche enthusiasm: there's a moment in "Chips Ahoy" when Franz Nicolay's organ is trilling away madly in a manner rarely heard since the heyday of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, but it's gone before one can develop a grudge against it, swept away in the commotion. Nicolay's rippling piano arpeggios, darting over the widescreen rock backing of opener "Stuck Between Stations", are an early signal of the band's debt to early Springsteen, though Craig Finn's vocal limitations – he doesn't really sing, just blurts out lines – entail the occasional appending of "whoa-oh-oh" collective chant-hooks to compensate for the shortfall in melody. But he has some great lines; I love the bit in "Ask Her for Adderall" about someone "supporting the Stones, it's her favourite band, except for The Ramones" – and knows how to deliver them with maximum nonchalant impact.

Download this: 'Stuck Between Stations', 'Ask Her for Adderall', 'Killer Parties'