Bill Toms could have called Hard Rain's new album "Harder Rain," kicking it off as he does with a street-tough bar-rock anthem fueled by Joffo Simmons' pounding Motor City beat, a fierce garage-rock riff on distorted electric guitar and Toms' impassioned vocals growling out the story of a faded boxing champ getting drunk at the neighborhood bar.

Banos Bill Toms is "The West End Kid." Hard Rain CD Release Show With: Joey Murphy, Tom Breiding and American Son. Where: Cefalo's, Carnegie. When: 9 p.m. Saturday. Tickets: $10.

"It is harder," he says. "As a matter of fact, what I did is I didn't put any acoustic guitars or mandolin or any acoustic instruments at all on the record. I wanted it to have that certain edge to it that you can only get with the electric instruments, that tension. I didn't want to warm it up or anything."

With Phil Brontz adding to the gritty wall of sound on saxophone, "The West End Kid" is pretty much the sonic opposite, in fact, of his previous effort, 2002's "One Lonesome Moment," a solo acoustic affair.

There's a definite lyrical arc to the album, and Toms says it mirrors the arc of his own life as the songs on "West End Kid" were forming in his head.

While the opening track is a character sketch inspired by the portrait of a '50s boxer hanging in his old rehearsal space, there are echoes of Toms' own life in every song.

"I look at the whole CD as a project," he says. "As a piece. It goes from these characters that are in very depressed states and about halfway through the CD there's a song, 'I'll Take My Pride,' about picking up the pieces and putting yourself back together and finding the hope. I didn't write it with that in mind, but over the past year and a half or so when I wrote the record, I realized that's what was happening to me. I was coming out of that depression into the light. I had to fix some things in my private life and fix some things mentally with myself, get things in order. And finally, by the end of that record, you can see, you're looking at the light, you're seeing the hope."

When Toms isn't fronting his own band, he's playing guitar for Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers with any number of the same musicians -- bassist Art Nardini, keyboard player Joe Pelesky, percussionist Bernie Herr and Joffo Simmons included. And this time out, Grushecky even stepped in as a guest and co-producer.

"This one, I just wanted to get everyone involved," says Toms. "And Joe's always good at that outside ear. He's such a part of how we sound anyway so he knows. But he's on the outside listening to these new songs for the first time and came up with some pretty good ideas."

With seven players in his band, including relatively recent add Tom Breiding on guitar, and a background in playing acoustic shows, Tom says he plans on supporting this record by any means necessary.

"I plan to play a lot with this record, whether it's with the band or I do a lot of solo acoustic shows," he says. "We can do duos or trios. It's one of the things I kind of worked myself into because I know it's hard to take a band out on the road. It's so expensive that I've tried to work up a show for any type of environment. Like, I can go out and do a solo acoustic tour, or duo or trio or a four-piece rock 'n' roll show, depending on the economics."