It's a Saturday night at the Rocket Club in Asheville, N.C. An audience of some 75 locals is congregated in a room that, according to the club's Web site, holds 400 bodies. Most in attendance stand milling around the bar, or are near the back of the room sitting in ergonomic bar stools at space-age cocktail tables. A short man in his late thirties challenges a fellow patron to an arm-wrestling match. Eight people have stepped close to the stage to check out the sounds of a three-piece rock unit from St. Louis.

Riddle Of Steel is three minutes in to their set's opening song, "Plenty Of Satisfaction," when singer and guitarist Andrew Elstner throats out a high-pitched "Yeah!" Drummer Rob Smith launches in to a 13 second drum solo, accented tightly by power chords from his band mates. Smith's eyes widen, and his feet and hands work in tandem to fill the space with rapid bursts of percussion and hissing, crashing bronze. The trio: Elstner, Smith and bassist Jimmy Vavak bring the opener home with a loud and melodic finale reminiscent of early 80's Van Halen. But this is not self indulgent arena rock wanking. In just over four minutes the message is delivered to willing recipients; it's succinct and self-assured: "We're only getting started. Hang out for more."

(Listen to "Plenty of Satisfaction" and "This Van Burns Love" from "1985″ by clicking the audio player below)

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The previous night, the band played to a packed, eager house at the Star Bar in Atlanta. But tonight's Asheville crowd appears to be, overall, an indifferent one. Among scattered applause, there's the hum of conversation over clinking pint glasses. From the back of the room, someone shouts "Good job!" Good job, indeed. The band plays through the rest of their set, perhaps for themselves and for the handful of people standing up front. Vavak alternates his posture between directly facing his bass cabinet and stepping to the edge of the stage, taunting the room with stares that read, in an eerily comic way, "how about I fuck the boredom out of you?" About halfway through the set, Elstner plugs in his 12-string Fender Strat-style Japanese reissue. He commences strumming the opening lines of "This Van Burns Love," the second song on Riddle Of Steel's new LP, 1985 (2008). It's a meta-song; one about writing music, bandmate dynamics, aspirations and, yes, lackluster shows.

"Those are the moments that test a band, especially when you're four states away from home. I realize we aren't fighting battles here; we're musicians, right? But we take it seriously, otherwise we wouldn't be doing it," Elstner explains via e-mail a few days after the Rocket Club show.

I had asked him a question that I hoped didn't come across as stale – what makes it worth it? What offsets the drag of being away from home for weeks at a time, going through stretches of shows with sparse audiences, owing money to the label, and dealing with flaky promoters (point of fact: the band once had a show fall through at the last minute, and the reason given by the promoter? The pollen was unbearable that season). Andrew's answer was simple, honest and humble: "We seriously enjoy it; there's no question that we're doing exactly what we want to do. We play and write because we love it, and we tour out of a need to promote our records, but that doesn't mean we don't sincerely enjoy it, because we do."

Much more than a chronicle of the challenges and tribulations of playing in a hard working independent band, "This Van Burns Love" is also a testament to the band's stylistic range. The guitars are clean, straightforward and subdued, which is a notable departure from the post hardcore feel of much of their earlier material, and also from the neo-classic rock sensibilities of 1985. Elstner mentioned that the band wasn't sure whether to include the song on the new album. "I think the initial hesitation was because it's a change from what we've done in the past, which is a minor risk for sure, but it is still a risk. But fuck it anyway, who wants to write the same songs over and over again? People can like it or hate it, it doesn't matter at all. What matters is if we like it or not.

"In high school if I wasn't listening to old rock records, I was listening to Jawbox. There wasn't really a tight scene of that kind of music happening in St. Louis. It was really fresh and really exciting. I still like Jawbox and Burning Airlines, and a lot of J. Robbins' stuff, but now I feel like, in a way, we're all getting back to our roots," Elstner says. "There's something really satisfying about listening to AC/DC or Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith, and not because it's 'cool.' For me, I'm writing songs, I'm coming up with all these parts and then, all of a sudden when you come full circle and you listen to the old shit again, you're like 'man, this is some really subtle song writing.' 'Back In Black,' that guitar riff is fucking timeless. Everybody knows that song, and it kicks so much ass. It sounds so cool, and he's barely doing anything."

Elstner, Smith and Vavak are undeniably skilled musicians. Elstner's upbringing was rich with musical mentoring. He says that there was always someone on the family piano – his grandfather and uncles all sang and played – and he fondly remembers waking up to the sound of his dad playing records. And when he was 12, the day before he was to attend his first drum lesson, he heard a friend of his play the electric guitar. "All it took was my buddy playing the low E string on a cruddy old Teisco Del Ray guitar through a DOD overdrive pedal and I pretty much shat my 12-year-old jeans. And then being able to learn your hero's tunes – the first song I learned was 'Sweet Emotion' and the second was 'Black Dog' – it sucks you right in."

He describes Smith as "a musician's drummer. Not in that studio session drummer kind of way, but in the skills, tastes, and perspective way. His style is a bit more straight-up than past drummers we've had, but he still has technique out the wazoo, and hits harder than any other drummer I've played with."

As for Vavak, a self-taught bass player, Elstner says "Jimmy has a really good ear for organization of a song in its entirety. I get set in my ways sometimes, but Jimmy has an innate sense of placement and flow from beginning to end."

Listening to the band's earlier material and comparing it to 1985, there's a discernible progression in style and sound from technical and mathematical to more stripped down and direct. Elstner describes the process as being "about the evolution of our tastes, ya know?" He explains that it stems from personal growth and having confidence in himself as a musician and writer, "I'll always love and play music, but the details that excited me eight years ago, don't always excite me now. In the past, I was playing in side projects, and we were trying to write the most complicated, mathematical parts. And after a while," pausing to search for the proper phrase, "it's not that it didn't age well, it's just not what I'm clinging to now in terms of songwriting. I think we've all progressed as songwriters in that in growing older, you gain a better perspective on what works and what doesn't, and at some point, the realization hits you that if you like playing it, you should.

"A million people can cover Rolling Stone's 'Street Fighting Man,' but no one can imitate that feel of the original, or the intensity of the vibe," he asserts. "Those are the things that ultimately matter in a song. Putting together a good song as an entire unit, that is much much much more difficult than writing a really complicated, mathy prog song. Writing a catchy hook that isn't some trite bullshit that you haven't heard a million times is really fucking challenging. And coming up with a good song means more to me now than anything"