American rock band The Hold Steady has clenched its musical jaw.

The band’s sixth studio album, “Teeth Dreams,” is a lyrically dense album with a heavy emphasis on storytelling.

Losing teeth is a common recurring dream and is often interpreted as being anxious about worldly things such as money and personal appearance.

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Throughout the album are recurring themes of alcohol over-indulgence. The lyrics tend to be the album’s most interesting aspect as frontman Craig Finn breathes life into each song with stories of drinking, drugs and women. The album runs start to finish without much excitement.

Since its formation in 2004, the band classifies its sound as a type of 1970’s bar-rock with garage beginnings. But with the addition of former Lucero guitarist Steve Selvidge, the group has added a new dynamic. An opportunity for other Hold Steady guitarist Tad Kubler blossoms as the dueling guitars feed off each other throughout the album.

“I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You” opens the album with a story of a man who comes home to visit, bringing his girlfriend with him. She quickly finds out about his life before she entered it and realizes it was a dark one. She becomes frightened and he realizes how bad of an idea it was to bring her to his city.

The alcohol-drenched song “Spinners” — one of the album’s singles — is an upbeat tune with a simple guitar melody blended with a fast paced drumbeat. Finn’s overlaying vocals describe a party girl who does not know when to stop.

“The Only Thing” comes together as the album’s third track. Finn describes a love lost — his mind travels back to a time before she was gone and describes how her teeth still appear in his dreams.

In the history of rock and roll, it is a recurring theme for bands to use a power ballad to slow the flow of an album — take a break from sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — and bring an emotional spirit into the music. The Hold Steady tries out its power ballad skills on “The Ambassador.”

While most power ballads talk about love and themes of nature, that is not the case forThe Hold Steady. This ballad talks about skinheads, bloodshed and bar fights. Close enough.

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The album’s remainder seems to move on without much variation until listeners arrive at the final two songs. Busting out the acoustics on “Almost Everything,” the band again slows down a little bit to show it is singing about more than just slamming beers and ingesting copious amounts of unidentifiable substances.

The band proves it can jam on “Oaks,” the album’s final song, a nine-minute track describing a few kids and their experience buying dope from the car wash. This is where the album’s biggest wildcard enters — a three-minute passionate guitar solo near the six-minute mark.

“Teeth Dreams” fails to really stand out in the overall scheme of rock; the story’s characters tend to stay the same throughout the album, most of them under the influence of enough alcohol and drugs to sedate a horse. However, the catchy guitar riffs and lyrically entertaining stories make this what it is — background bar rock.

“Teeth Dreams” is available on iTunes and can be streamed on Spotify.

Kyle Sutton can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @KyleSutton_DE