Boys and Girls in America.

BOYS AND GIRLS IN AMERICA The Hold Steady (Vagrant Records, 2006)

One side of the rock tradition (call it the Church of Elvis) is Southern, Protestant, and tormented by the contradiction between Sunday morning and Saturday night. But another rock denomination is Northern, urban, and Catholic. It starts with Dion (DiMucci) and the Belmonts and runs on down through Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith. That Catholic rock tradition continues today in the person of The Hold Steady singer-songwriter Neil Finn.

Like many of the other Catholic rock artists, the 33-year-old Finn is lapsed in practice but still possessed by a distinctly Catholic sacramental vision of life in which the sacred is embodied in the temporal, and men and women are forever groping after that elusive point of connection between the two.

On Boys and Girls in America, The Hold Steady honor great Catholic rockers with their mainstream '70s sound that seems to blend Bruce Springsteen and Thin Lizzy. On this album Finn is also inspired by two great Catholic American writers--beat novelist Jack Kerouac and poet John Berryman (who died in the band's hometown of Minneapolis).

The albums title, and recurring theme, comes from Kerouac's line, "Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together" And do they ever, in these songs, as they chase transcendence in a bottle, a bag of mushrooms, or a boyfriend, and remain "inconsolable because we can't get as high as we got that first night" Meanwhile Berryman's last flight off the Mississippi River bridge gets the last half of the albums opening track, "Stuck Between Stations."

I wouldn't give Boys and Girls in America to anyone under 18. Its romantic vision of wasted youth is far too compelling. But any listener with a few miles on the odometer will be floored by the deep and tragic vision in these happy songs about sad people.