|
|
The Hold SteadyAlbums ReviewedSeparation Sunday (2005)Boys and Girls In America (2006) Separation Sunday(2005)Vocalist Craig Finn and guitarist Tab Kubler were inspired to form the Hold Steady while watching The Band's The Last Waltz. The resulting band walks the line between modern indie and classic rock; Finn's lyrics are edgy enough to appeal to a hip, young audience, yet laced with enough literary devices, inter-referencing and Biblical allusions to merit more close analysis than anyone this side of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. Most of the group were raised around Minneapolis, and their output reflects this; the opening track 'Hornets! Hornets!' contains the classic couplet "I guess the heavy stuff ain't quite at its heaviest/By the time it gets out to suburban Minneapolis." Finn was also raised as a Catholic, and a lot of the band's lyrics are drawn from the conflict between the sacred and the profane, between religious awakening and adolescent sex and drugs ("I guess I heard about original sin/I heard the dude blamed the chick/I heard the chick blamed the snake/I heard they were naked when they got busted"). Finn's voice is limited here to gripping but amelodic narrations, with the musical content coming from Kubler's relentless, creative guitar riffs and Franz Nicolay's elegant keyboards, and the net effect is often reminiscent of rock like Bruce Springsteen's classic seventies albums with the E-Street Band. Thematically dense, Separation Sunday revolves around four characters: the narrator Craig, the pimp Charlemagne, the skinhead Gideon, and Holly/Hallelujah, who veers between faith, addiction and prostitution. While a lot of the appeal of Separation Sunday comes from Finn's intertwining stories, there's plenty of musical punch here too. The most immediate track here is perhaps 'Your Little Hoodrat Friend', which has something closer to a vocal melody than most of the other tracks here, with its insistent "I ain't ever been with your little hoodrat friend/What makes you think I'm getting with your little hoodrat friend?" and its rhythmic guitar fills and powerful organ backdrops. As Finn is largely dispensing with vocal melodies altogether, Kubler is free to play almost anything, and the riff that fuels 'Stevie Nix' is both brutal and intricate. The record climaxes with the double punch of the short mournful 'Crucifixion Cruise' and the celebratory 'How A Resurrection Really Feels', which bounces along with an optimistic horn line. Separation Sunday is fascinating stuff; all the literary and classic rock allusions make it total aging music critic fodder, but it's pretty accessible all the same, although you might want to start with the next record, where they start writing vocal melodies. 
Boys and Girls In America(1998)After the extremely ambitious Separation Sunday, which managed to effortlessly justify its thematic conceit, Boys And Girls In America is relatively lightweight. While some of its characters make return appearances ("Charlemagne pulls street corner scams/Gideon's got a pipe made from a Pringles can/Holly's insatiable/She still looks incredible"), some of this record is devoted to material that's downright banal in comparison to the literary ambitions of ambitious Separation Sunday. That's a minor complaint; even if he's not as ambitious here, Finn's still endlessly quotable by rock lyricist standards ("We started recreational/It ended up all medical/It came on hot and soft and then/It tightened up its tentacles"). More crucially, Boys And Girls In America is far more musically accessible than its predecessor, with Finn actually singing discernable vocal melodies on many of the tracks, while the band's approach is a little less brutal and even more reminiscent of the E-Street band in their prime, with Nicolay's leads straight from the Roy Bittan school of piano playing. And despite the occasional lightweight track, Boys And Girls In America is one of the most instantly visceral rock records of this decade. While Separation Sunday had hints of potential salvation amongst the confused lives of the protagonists, here it's almost perpetual chaos, and it's the mixture of fragile beauty in the music and hopelessness in the lyrics that gives Boys And Girls In America an almost unstoppable power in places. On some levels 'First Night' is little more than a pretty issue piano ballad for most of its duration, but it suddenly switches gear into a torrent of guitars and some of Finn's most incisive lyrics ("Don't bother talking to the guys/With the hot soft eyes/They're already taken/Don't even speak/To all those sequencer and beats boys/When they kiss they spit white noise"). 'Southtown Girls' builds from a single a capella vocal into another tour de force, while 'Citrus' never raises its pulse above a simple acoustic lament ("Lost in fog and love and faithless fear/I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere). Meanwhile, the trio of rockers that open the record are all incredible, with Nicolay fluidly filling the gaps between Kubler's propulsive riffs, and the surprisingly funky rhythm section underpinning proceedings. In some ways Separation Sunday is the a consistent and accomplished album, but when Boys And Girls In America hits full flight, it's some of the most compelling music in rock music's canon.
|
|
|
|
Written 2001-2009, Graham Fyfe
