Review:

on 2011-07-25 CharlesMartel Said:

I was, like many people, ambivalent about the Hold Steady's last effort "Stay Positive". It seemed as if it were a logical conclusion from their previous album, "Boys and Girls in America", which marked the high point of the band's work so far. I suppose it was almost inevitable that it would be hard to top an album like that, but "Stay Positive" was not really a progression and, in addition, it contained some real clunkers which distracted you from whatever good was in there. I held out higher hopes for this release when I heard it was coming out.

The Hold Steady are not to everyone's taste. But to me they represent an aspect of American life which is pretty much absent in the UK - the narrative band telling their tales of girl-obsessed boys living their lives against a backdrop of mundanity broken only by pharmaceutical and alcohol excesses which conflict with the American relationship between man and God, as personified by a peculiarly white, right-wing, gun-toting Jesus Christ. Above all, the Hold Steady are a band which I have always imagined would play in rough house bars in small country towns in the Mid-West where their particular brand of story-telling strikes a familiar chord with their prospective audience.

The trouble is that there are only so many stories you can tell about that subject before you inevitably begin to cover old ground. That was the trap the Hold Steady fell into on "Stay Positive" and they don't seem to have got themselves out of it on "Heaven is Whenever". Whereas "Girls and Boys in America" took a collection of bar-room songs and turned them into a series of wonderful vignettes, full of pithy and pertinent observations of life in small-town America, songs which brought to life that aspect of American life which is so absent from Europe, so alien, so repugnant and at the same time so fascinating, the two subsequent albums do neither.

The departure of keyboard player Franz Nicolay has meant that the guitars are more to the fore than on previous albums and the keyboards play a minor role, more akin to backing than leading. The major consequence of this is that many of the songs are more one-dimensional and, instead of combining sharp classy pop with driving rockers, the songs seem to be evenly split between the two. Another division in the type of songs on offer is that between the straight up rockers and the more reflective ones, a division which has not really surfaced before.

On the positives, Craig Finn's capacity for writing little lyrical gems, especially about dysfunctional youth, is still as strong as ever. Finn's male characters are still being strung along and stung by the type of women who we all know and generally have the good sense to stay away from - the ones who only cause you trouble  but who just can't help themselves 

"I'm pretty sure I wasn't your first choice
I think I was the last one remaining"

Finn's female characters are still the religion obsessed misfits who stumble around looking for that elusive combination of a relationship which satisfies both their emotional and spiritual needs and, invariably ends up satisfying neither. However, it is when he steps out of these stereotypes that he comes up with his best lyrics and the album's best track, "We Can Get Together" about a relationship based solely on listening to records together.

Yet for each occasion the band promise something special, they also provide a moment when they sink well below that standard. For every blues-based "The Sweet Part of the City" there is agricultural "The Smidge"; for every successful experiment with different musical patterns such as "A Slight Discomfort", there is a failed one, like the horn-back Dixie sound of "Barely Breathing" which uses an unnecessary and out-of-character vocal synthesiser.

What we are left with is a picture of a band in transition. The Hold Steady seem to know that there is a limited shelf-life to the sort of music which kicked them off and which peaked with "Girls and Boys and America". But they do not seem to have fully worked out where they are going. Transition is a difficult thing, and it is all the more difficult if you do not know what you are transitioning to. The Hold Steady have got themselves, to quote one of their own songs, "Stuck Between Stations", and this album is not really going to move them further along the tracks.
Rating: 6/10