reax music magazine :: music + culture » Reviews » The Hold Steady - Stay Positive

Will the blue collar schmoes that Craig Finn sings about ever fully embrace his music as fervently as us privileged hipsters?  On The Hold Steady’s fourth studio LP, Finn and his fellow Minneapolis transplants wade through the bodies that litter across the Rust Belt like debris on the highway after a jack-knifed tractor trailer.  It’s The Hold Steady’s responsibility to pick up the pieces and stitch them into this mosaic.  This time misery is no longer lampooned by cartoon characters.  There is no Charlemagne, no killer parties, no chill out tent.  These are nameless names of faceless faces, of dead townies and slapped actresses, all defeated souls, through addiction or salvation, whom we all feel distant when listening to their tales of woe.  Yet on the surface, this is the still best bar band in American rock with pianist Franz Nicolay carring the day, assisted by new accoustic guitars, mandolins, and harpsichord (even bar bands are into prog rock).  Tad Kubler is at his virtuoso best, although his take on Joe Satriani sometimes takes you out of the moment.  And Finn’s maturation as a vocalist has arrived; his song-speak routine that was his gimmick on Almost Killed Me is virtually extinct all the while enhancing his ability to write a lyric that can strike you right in the heart. “It’s always sunny in the morning, sucks around the ending of the night” he sings when dealing with an addict you love in “Slapped Actress” or when making a plea to the big man upstairs on “Lord, I’m Discouraged,” or in “Magazines” when a Fredo Corleone gripe’s about a girlfriend’s habit wearing him down:  When on the grunge opus, Finn asks “don’t tell your friends we went down to Ybor City again,” its as if he is asking to us not tell them—his characters—they are just playthings in a Thomas Pynchon tragedy hidden beneath E Street bombast.  Don’t worry Craig, your secret is safe with us hipsters.