In honour of a certain very special New Release Monday, I’d like to indulge in a little repost: my review of Stay Positive by the Hold Steady, as originally posted on the second-best artist-run blog on the internet. The word on the street is that my household owns three copies already. I blame HMV stocking one copy of the vinyl.
T in the Park “review” will follow when the sunburn I didn’t know I had fades enough to type. Or, y’know, when I get the photos online.
I bought my copy of Boys and Girls in America… in America, of all places, on my first (and so far, only) visit to New York City. I’d gotten to hear of the Hold Steady in the summer of 2006, when Stereogum started writing about them fairly regularly, and I liked what I heard. The comparisons with Springsteen and the Replacements, two of my biggest musical touchstones, only helped matters. I bought the album in the big Virgin Megastore on 42nd Street; a shiny, sanitised display of everything the music stood against, with an “import section” populated by acts from my native Paisley. I got to slip the album onto my end of year list, although it wouldn’t be out in the UK until 2007 was already bedded in. It made it to number 7.
I had yet to realise something amazing had already happened to me.
In February 2007, I took my boyfriend to the band’s first show on Scottish soil, upstairs in a notorious club in Glasgow. It was Valentines Day, and Craig thanked those in the crowd who had “dragged their girlfriends along”. What if you dragged your boyfriend? I remember yelling, not that it made any difference: by that point there were two of us in this household completely, obsessively smitten.
Why do I love the Hold Steady so much? They’re a band often written off by the indie intelligentsia as a “bar band” with a simplistic all-American feel, but the themes are so universal it doesn’t matter that I’m working in an office job half a world away. Craig Finn’s flair for a lyric speaks to my lapsed Catholicism, my post-party girl, mid-to-let’s-face-it-late 20s burnout. I took a week off work to follow the band around the UK earlier this year, and it was a wrench to drag myself back to my city centre legal office. Finn hadn’t even told me yet that I could be something bigger.
The characters that populate the Hold Steady’s earlier work are back in Stay Positive (if not by name), and they’re as druggy and messed-up as ever. But this time they’re older, sadder, dealing with the consequences and trying to lift themselves from their obscurity. It makes for a depth that, although not lifting the album to the giddy greatness of their finest hour, Separation Sunday, certainly edges it above its blogworthy predecessor.
Finn too is older and has consequences to deal with; only in his case it’s not those of drugs and redemption and all-night disco parties but rather the consequences of his position as an elder statesman among the girls and boys at the rock shows. The album’s title track is more autobiography than the usual character-led narrative that characterises Finn’s lyrical output, with a shouty “woah-oah-oah” chorus that will go down well live as Franz Nikolai goes wild on the harpsichord. The kids at [our] shows will have kids of their own, he muses, before admitting that it’s one thing to start out with a positive jam and another thing to see it through.
Which seems like a good time to dip back, because with album opener “Constructive Summer” that’s just what the Hold Steady do. It’s a striking start, our songs are singalong songs with the throaty rasp of Lucero’s Ben Nichols added to the mix and a crashing guitar that makes me wish I had an open-top car, despite Scotland’s changeable weather (or perhaps a driving license). Setting out its manifesto in one of my all-time favourite Craig Finn couplets (“raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer//think he might have been our only decent teacher”), it’s a song that screams summer mix-tapes and all day parties with friends.
After that, things turn serious. There are hints of sordid bathroom hook-ups (”Sequestered in Memphis”), and crimes which are never fully explained (”One For The Cutters”, with its scene-setting spooky harpsichord part). A double crucifixion plays a prominent role (”Both Crosses”), and it’s hard not to connect the dots, link the songs or include those characters we’re already familiar with. Perhaps those “complicated things” which a boy known only as Gideon once got caught up in have finally been explained.
The album’s epic mid-point, “Lord, I’m Discouraged”, is this year’s “First Night”. It’s gorgeous and desperate, heavy with piano and the Catholic imagery that Finn so loves. The song showcases the band’s tender side, their awareness of the other side of the Cutters’ screw-up party culture and the narrator’s yearning to play saviour to the album’s desperate, “sweetness and songbirds when the choir sings on Sundays” heroine. His prayers answered, there are plenty of joyful notes to be struck in the album’s latter half: two lovestuck kids, on the run perhaps (”Yeah Sapphire”), and Ben Nichols’ voice again proving the perfect counterpoint to the teenage crushing in “Magazines”.
Final track “Slapped Actress” is an unsurprising lesson in closing an album in style from a band whose previous attempts have included “Killer Parties” (an ending so fitting it’s closed every Hold Steady show I’ve attended) and “How A Resurrection Really Feels”. In this case we close on opening night, with the band as directors “making their own movies”, but it’s the bit when the instruments stop and the houselights go down on voices singing us out in unison that makes it. Hey Douglas, I think I’ve found my album of the year and we’re only at halfway.
STREAM: Stay Positive on Myspace.
