Review:

on 2011-08-01 CharlesMartel Said:

I first came upon the Hold Steady through "Boys and Girls in America" so if you like, I am coming at this the wrong way round. But then, if you look at my experience of this album in the same way as you would view Star Wars: Episodes 1-3 then there is nothing wrong in a prequel. If "Boys and Girls in America" was a concept album about the sad, meaningless lives of the protagonists, Holly, Gideon and Charlemagne, then this album kind of explains how they got there. And given that "Separation Sunday" was only released in the UK after "Boys and Girls in America" you really have little choice but to take it that way.

Craig Finn can't sing now, and he couldn't sing then either. He builds his lyrics around clever imagery, biting wit and the vivid portrayal of people and the society in which they live. "Separation Sunday" is small-town America with all its conventions and contradictions, yet for all the scope for satire, Finn manages to deliver his stories completely free of judgment and sarcasm. He becomes the ultimate storyteller, a bar-room philosopher whom alcohol has not turned into an embittered cynic.

The story of the album is about how a messed-up Catholic girl called Hallelujah - Holly for short - falls in with a bunch of drugged up, boozed out kids and, through them, experiences all the drugs and sex and booze she could never wish to get mixed up in. You first meet here in "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" as the lonely little girl with the crush on the protagonist. Like all the characters in the Hold Steady's world, she is a Christian (Catholic in her case) and Biblical imagery and references to Jesus abound. To a European like myself, for whom Jesus had no part in my teenage years, this provides an interesting insight into the teenage American psyche. But the result is not what you expect. Jesus might be there, but he has little discernable impact except on a superficial level. She may have tattooed on the small of her back in blue-black ink "damn right I'll rise again" but that is as far as the influence on her life goes. Jesus is just one more pressure on her to conform, and like all rebellious teenagers, when was a pressure to conform ever going to be the deciding influence on her behaviour -

"I ain't gonna do anything sexual with you
I'm kinda saving myself for the scene"

Religion, like sex and drugs and rock n roll, offers just one more alternative salvation - no more real and no less beguilingly illusory. The comparison is drawn ever so neatly in "Cattle and the Creeping Things" where the attention being paid to the cross round her neck may or may not have something to do with the fact it is worn

on her chest with three open buttons

And later, when Holly finally meets "The Scene" she finds it not what she expected 

"She got strung out on the scene
She got scared when it got druggy
The way the whispers bit like fangs
In the last hour of the parties" ("Stevie Nix")

Yet before long, Holly, like everyone else, goes to "Penetration Park"  and if you haven't figured out where that is, then you haven't listened to this record enough. Yet if there is one line which sums up Holly's fate, it is this 

"She got screwed up by religion
She got screwed by soccer players"

The story is told, in all its bleakness, of a group of kids searching for a meaning and finding nothing of the sort. And so the scene is set for the denouement of "Boys and Girls in America".

In other words, if you want to know what led up to "Boys and Girls in America" you have to start here. The lyrics, the delivery and the style is as strong on both albums. What makes "Separation Sunday" the inferior album, in my view, is not the fact that it is less polished than its successor, but that it lacks some really good hooks. "Boys and Girls in America" was bar-room rock, a good stomp-along full of memorable melodies as much as memorable lines. The melodies are not so strong here. It takes a while for them to sink in. As the appeal of the Hold Steady is that their music is like Trojan software - it buries into your head, taking with it the words and the story - the lack of a good, honest, dirty rock n roll hook is the biggest drawback to the album.
Rating: 7/10