Bruce Springsteen. Cheap Trick. Thin Lizzy. Billy Joel.

For a cool, talked-about band, The Hold Steady sure have some uncool, untalked-about influences.

Influences the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minneapolis band makes little effort to conceal.

All of which ... uh ... makes these guys cool. Right?

Yes and no. For it's not where songwriters and second-time-around bandmates Craig Finn and Tad Kubler have been that matters. It's where, musically, they are going. Even if in their uncool roots are showing.

"I grew up in a small town," Kubler begins by way of explanation. "A lot of the kids in my neighbourhood were older than I was, and they were getting Cheap Trick and Thin Lizzy and AC/DC records, and I was borrowing from them.

"I learned to play guitar sitting by the record player and moving the needle back and playing along. And it's really rewarding to be sitting in the studio listening to a playback and hearing certain nuances of bands and albums that I liked so much when I first connected to rock 'n' roll. We always wanted to have a band like that."

It's not quite like that, of course. For while Finn's tales of small-town Saturday nights and the five-piece's too-late-to-stop-now delivery inevitably bring early Springsteen to mind, the songwriting on Boys and Girls is simply too strong to be weighed down by any charges of derivation. The coolnoscenti may wish to present the band with a wag of the finger, but they will be doing so in rhythm. And likely tapping their feet as well.

"What we're doing right now certainly lacks the pretense and veneer of cool that a lot of bands are trying to emulate," Kubler asserts. "It's just five guys getting together every night and playing what they like to play.

"You know, a lot of musical references are thrown around about what influences us as a band, but the real thing about it is that it's a celebration of music being a part of your life. That's really what the band is about."

John Hummel claims he was following tradition by assembling a band for the final night of his four-year run of booking bands Thursdays at Zaphod Beeblebrox. The end of Ballistic's Bullpen in 2001, he says, called for a performance by Johnny Ballistic, aka Hummel, himself.

That 'tradition' presumably began with Johnny Vegas, who had been running the show prior to Ballistic's arrival in '98. And, well, it ended with Hummel, who now has something to show for his efforts -- he and that 'crack band' became The Crackband, and five years later they have a CD to show for their efforts.

The self-titled Crackband CD is a particularly poppy -- Britpoppy, even -- affair, with Hummel, guitarist Stuart Brodie and bassist Michelle Berzins (you can call her Fire) joyously trading vocal lines through a dozen original songs. Four years in the making, the CD is a worthy document of The Crackband's sound. The band that celebrates its release Saturday, however, will have a slightly different look. Different, yet familiar.

That's because Hammerheads frontman has stepped into Brodie's shoes as The Crackband's guitarist. (Brodie, Hummel explains, "Got a job in another city on the last day of recording.")

"Tim hasn't been onstage with a guitar in years," Hummel says, "but he's sounding great. Obviously, he's busy with The Hammerheads, so we're going to take it gig by gig. But he's loving the distortion pedal."