St. Patrick is watching television and recovering from a late night in New Orleans when he picks up the phone.

“Last night was a rip-roarin’ good ol’ time,” says St. Patrick, aka Patrick Costello.

He and the rest of the brew-swilling, socio-political maelstrom of punk that is Dillinger Four are on the tail end of a three-month tour in support of their latest effort, “Situationist Comedy,” released on Fat Wreck Chords.

So it comes as no surprise that he and the rest of the band are feeling a little “burly” today. Never mind their trip to Bourbon Street.

“We got real loaded,” the D4 bassist says. “I don’t really remember coming home at all.”

And with Tropical Storm Isidore darkening the skies of the Big Easy, Costello has more to think about than the thunder in his head.

“There’s no traffic or anything,” he explains. “[They’re] just waiting for impending doom.”

However, Costello’s not worried.

“Mother Nature’s got nothing on us,” he says. “We’ll fight her to the death for sure.”

Behind Dillinger Four’s punk rock bravado and beer-fueled humor lies four intelligent guys from Minnesota who can quote Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” while chomping on burritos.

“On the one hand, we don’t want to have anyone think of us solely as just this goofy band of fat guys that play music,” Costello says. “But on the other hand, we don’t ever want to be relegated to the category of ultra-political bands that are going to talk down to you and yell at you about something at a show.”

Instead, the band fires off material from throughout their eight-year history, songs with wry titles such as “Suckers Int’l. has Gone Public” and “Music is None of My Business.”

And then there is the “Moby Dick” of a title “SELLTHEHOUSESELLTHECARSSELLTHEKIDSFINDSOMEONEELSEFORGETITI’MNEVERCOMINGBACKFORGETIT,” which appears on “Situationist Comedy.”

“On the next record we’re going to have one even longer than that,” Costello says – or is that threatens?

But the unorthodox titles are there for a purpose: to give the name a character of its own.

“It’s like, if the final line in the novel is, ‘And then there was peace,’ the book doesn’t get named, ‘And Then There was Peace,” he explains.

The same goes for D4 album titles. The Minnesota punks culled “Situationist Comedy” from a movement in the ’50s and ’60s called the Situationist Movement. The Situationists found creative ways to get political ideas across in the simplest way possible.

“You don’t have to get all academic about this stuff that we’re putting up with everyday,” he continues.

“The Situationists did a lot of really neat things. They’d destroy streets so that banking sections of Paris would be inoperable for a day or two.”

Partially, the album title speaks to D4’s emulation of the movement in its desire to make a serious point while still having fun.

But it also has a more pessimistic meaning.

“You look at what punk rock is being known as today, [and] it’s pretty sad,” Costello says. “At one point it was pretty challenging, creative and almost kind of augural kind of music.

“And now it’s very cute and cuddly and delightful and something suburban moms giggle at and think it’s something like Avril Lavigne, what have you, Blink-182.”

Costello speaks almost bitterly about punk’s evolution.

“Situationism helped inspire this and 20 years later it’s bastardized itself into this bizarre mall-friendly, nonthreatening, not-making-you-want-to-think piece of shit.”

Even as Costello reports that the sky is now twice as dark as it was earlier, his attitude lightens as he talks about the content of D4’s “The Total Fucking Emo Tour.”

He says the band has been telling the crowds: “Tell that weird cousin that you don’t know that we’re emo, ’cause all the emo people want to be called punk. Fine, they can have punk, I want emo.”

It’s good to know a tropical storm can’t keep a good punk down.

“If you weigh as much as I do it takes a lot more than a little fuckin’ wind to blow you away.”