IN THE PANTHEON Nicolay, Kubler, Drake, Polivka, and Finn. |
What do you do on the mornings after the massive nights, when exhilaration turns to exhaustion, when faith gives way to doubt, when you’re faced with burning out or growing up? Indie rock heroes the Hold Steady provide the answer in the title to their fourth sensational album. You gotta Stay Positive.
Craig Finn, the band’s principal songwriter, crafts hard-rocking novellas full of poets, pushers, users, barflies, and strangely uninhibited Catholic girls, with words that fly like bullets in the rat-tat-tat of his Gatling gun delivery. From the moment YouTube captured him erupting into joyful spasms while singing “Rosalita” next to the Boss himself, Finn’s reputation as Bruce Springsteen’s spiritual heir was cemented. And though the comparisons aren’t entirely apt, they’re hard to ignore, right down to the conceptual and aesthetic arc of the Hold Steady’s recorded output. After two albums of blazing songs and wild wordplay earned critical praise but minimal sales, the third disc changed the game by streamlining the sound and syllables on anthems brimming with confidence and hope. Sound familiar? And if 2006’s Boys and Girls in America was the Hold Steady’s Born to Run, Stay Positive is their Darkness On the Edge of Town, where the cocksure auteur grows older and less certain of his place in the world, questioning himself and his beliefs like never before. The echoes are evident from the opening track, “Constructive Summer,” where friends in a dead-end town drink on top of water towers and dare to dream of something better. Keep pushin’ till these badlands start treating us good.
But dreams come with eyes wide open on an album of hard truths and harsh consequences. From the beginning, the Hold Steady’s songs have swelled with tales of excess, but on Stay Positive, the stories are less celebratory, more cautionary. Instead of participating in parties in Finn’s native Minneapolis, we fan out across the country to observe people in the shadowy margins of small towns, facing frailty, fate, and faith.
Religion has always been a linchpin of the Hold Steady’s songs, with Catholic kids rebelling against social constraints. On Stay Positive, though, faith is personal, complicated, and even compromised, like in “Yeah Sapphire,” where Finn asks, “If I cross myself when I come would you maybe receive me,” leaping from sacred to profane in a jaw-dropping instant. But Finn has never wrestled with religion more reverently than on the melodically elegant and lyrically bruising “Lord, I’m Discouraged,” one of the band’s most arresting songs yet. When drugs ravage the girl he wants but can’t have, the narrator confesses his doubt directly to God, before finally surrendering: “I know it’s unlikely she’ll ever be mine, so I mostly just pray she don’t die,” he says, belief hanging by a thread.
When that thread snaps, Finn finds faith in rock and roll. “Our psalms are sing-along songs,” he declares in the album’s very first verse, and the belief in those sacred texts is reaffirmed seven tracks later when he shouts “the sing-along songs will be our scriptures.” Music also serves as a proxy for formal education. “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer/I think he might have been our only decent teacher,” Finn sings in a line that recalls Springsteen’s “we learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.”
But while Finn walks along E Street, his right hand, guitarist Tad Kubler, wields the hammer of the gods. Led Zeppelin has long been implicit in the Hold Steady’s music, and Finn even name-checks a handful of the band’s tunes on “Joke About Jamaica.” But it’s Kubler who brings the influence front-and-center on Stay Positive, unleashing titanic riffs, like on “Navy Sheets,” which marries Houses of the Holy-style thunder with a keyboard straight out of the Cars’ playbook. “Lord, I’m Discouraged,” though, is where Kubler glows hottest and channels Jimmy Page to the fullest. As the song begins, Kubler’s electric 12-string chimes, setting the mournful tone. But the solo is where he takes true flight. Tad lies in wait while Finn nails the rock bottom of addiction — “She says that she’s sick but she won’t get specific/The sutures and bruises are none of my business/This guy from the north side comes down to visit/His visits they only take five or six minutes.” And before Finn’s voice can tail off, Kubler begins to soar in an elegy that’s logical, lyrical, spiritual, and mystical, every bit as resonant as Finn’s devastating words.
Producer John Agnello returns for the second straight album, and the band — toughened and tightened by relentless touring — sticks close to the bar band fury of Boys and Girls in America, with horns and strings adding punch and texture. But twice the sound strays in ways that are as disquieting as Finn’s darker moods. On “One for the Cutters,” a harpsichord, baroque and eerie, cuts through the twin guitar clatter to frame the tale of a girl who comes home from college with a crank habit, a faraway stare, and a penchant for partying in the woods with townies. And on the droning “Both Crosses,” a banjo (played by J. Mascis), vibraphone, and theremin lend to the gauzy haze of religious and sexual reverie, where visions of crucifixions mesh with the merging of bodies, and “transverberation” means more than the piercing of hearts.
