While many of their indie-rock contemporaries remain mired in gloom and doom, The Hold Steady demonstrated with a sold-out Turner Hall Ballroom that there is still a place for fun in rock ’n’ roll. In fact, it appears as if the band’s genuine warmth and love of music has helped to grow an even larger audience. No longer just a secret among in-the-know hipsters, the group attracted a remarkably diverse crowd. And those in attendance . . .

On Friday at Turner Hall, armed with only a pair of acoustic guitars and their voices, Escovedo and David Pulkingham delivered a graduate-level class on songwriting that ranged from sensitive ballads to Mexican-influenced tunes to flat-out punk-rock noise—sometimes even in the same song.

Like Jonathan Richman, Jens Lekman is a doeeyed and baritonevoiced songwriter who travels the world singing simple, unaffected songs about universal experiences. And like Richman, he writes some of the purest, most genuine music ever recorded. But where Richman relies on just a primitive guitardrum setup to share his vision in concert, Lekman aims for something grander. For his latest tour, he’s recruited a quintet of musicians, including a violinist and cellist, whose swooning strings caress his more intimate songs and aggrandize his zippier, poppier ones. With a little assistance from a laptop, Lekman’s arrangements can conjure anything from classic soul to disco to calypso. Jonathan Richman’s music only sounds this fully realized in Jonathan Richman’s head.

Few bands blur the line between thrilling and tedious like the Duluth slowcore trio Low.

Even in his 40s, Stephen Malkmus is still as skinny as a teenager and as malleable as a Gumby doll. The former Pavement frontman possesses no discernable backbone: When he leans forward during a particularly impassioned solo, his head hangs nearly eye level with his guitar. Much of the weight that often results from settling down with a wife and a pair of kids never came to Malkmus; neither did the complacency that besets many musicians by middle age. Instead, Malkmus’ solo albums have pushed, often aggressively, against the Pavement template, and never more than on his latest disc, Real Emotional Trash . . .

In October 2005, while Swedish-born Jos Gonzlez rode the ripples from the abrupt wave of international acclaim given to his 2003 album, Veneer, in the wake of its U.S. release, I watched an unaccompanied Mia Doi Todd face the impatient, hirsute horde that had amassed for a late-night show at The Independent in San Francisco. Todd was illmatched as the opener for another Scandinavian . . .

In both sound and manner of dress, members of The Scarring Party draw from the musicians of the early 20th century. Their frontman warbles like a demented vaudevillian performer, and they prominently feature a tuba. Their lyrics read like a 21st-century adaptation of the Old Testament. And they are quickly becoming one of the hottest acts in Milwaukee. Playing a well-attended Turner Hall Ballroom to commemorate the release of their new album, Come Away from the Light, the peculiar band demonstrated why so many have embraced them. The group’s newest material fleshes out the promise of its earlier work, adding cello and violin to a mix that already includes a litany of off-thewall instruments . . .

To borrow a title from the artist’s own songbook, Bruce Springsteen once again “proved it all night” as he and a reunited E Street Band rocked the Bradley Center for a near-capacity crowd Monday night. There were a few empty patches of seats, mostly behind the sports arena’s stage, but they were hard to see amid the joyous audience’s dancing and singing during an aggressive two-and-a-half-hour set. Springsteen, 58, and his eight-member, black-clad band have slowed a little since their earlier days. Some have put on weight, others have lost their hair . . .

When multiple bands have little more in common than the same bill, the temptation to compare shiny apples to citrus is difficult to resist. At Turner Hall on Friday night, The Redwalls’ encyclopedic pastiche of ‘60s British rock felt anachronistically juxtaposed with Milwaukee’s own self-conscious duo, Fever Marlene. Though the two bands are separated geographically by fewer than 70 miles, outside the studio their respective sounds span an appreciable distance of nearly four decades. Local openers The Saltshakers ended their raucous set with a cover of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” providing an apropos segue for The Redwalls,

The Newark, N.J.-based alternative hip-hop group Dalek has made a career out of defying expectations of what rap music should—or should not—sound like. On record, the band has managed to meld such disparate influences as Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Mogwai, My Bloody Valentine and Jesu to create a sound that remarkably coheres into something all its own. There is a sense that group members truly love all forms of underground music, and it comes across on their albums. With the horrors of the unholy late- 1990s “rap-rock” phenomenon quickly dissolving from our collective cultural memory, Dalek allows us to fully see the artistic benefits of indiscriminate genre-hopping. Yet the act of reproducing recorded rap tracks in a live setting is a skill that has eluded even some of the most gifted performers, and judging from its recent Cactus Club performance, even Dalek finds it difficult.