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The Hold Steady - Stay Positive
- Hold Steady albums are a reviewer’s dream. With an album as self-referential as Stay Positive, the best descriptions of the music can be found in the songs themselves. “Our psalms are sing-along songs,” (“Constructive Summer”) . . . yup. “We were kids in the crowd and now we’re dogs in this war,” (“Joke About Jamaica”) . . . well-put.
Influences? You don’t need to look hard there either; they’ve got them on their sleeves next to their hearts and failing livers. “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer,” in “Summer,” points to the Clash, “The Youth of Today and the early 7 Seconds taught me some of life’s most valuable lessons,” in “Stay Positive,” nods at two lesser-known groups. And if that’s still too subtle, the Zeppelin song name-checks in “Joke About Jamaica” flow as fast as the beer at their concerts. Looks like they've preempted the standard band comparison review as well.
More than just dropping names though, Stay Positive firmly establishes the Hold Steady as a band future groups would do well to reference. After a year and a half of constant touring, cultivating a fan base so rabid they have a name (the Unified Scene), all the band’s promise seen in earlier records explodes out here. They justify the constant analogies of Bruce Springsteen as a bar band with crunchy guitars and bouncing keys, but even the Boss’s songs don’t have as many sing-along hooks as Craig Finn crams in. From one “woah-woah” to the next, fist-pumping opportunities abound. Though there are a few musical diversions from their previous albums, instruments like the harpsichord (“One for the Cutters”) and accordion (“Lord, I’m Discouraged”) come across as logical extensions of the band’s stadium sound, not self-conscious attempts to generate interview talking points.
Finn’s hyper-wordy lyrics also tread familiar ground. Though the group’s recurring characters are largely absent here--no more accounts of Charlemagne for fans to analyze--the go-to topic of hard drugs recurs throughout these character studies. Not your typical hard-living band though, these straightforward accounts rarely glorify the lifestyle. The narrator of “Chips Ahoy!” on the last album, so excited by the money he and his girl have to buy pills, sees the darker side of this partying when he sings, “I know it’s unlikely she’ll ever be mine, so I mostly just pray she don’t die,” in “Lord.” The sex-and-drugs girl on “One for the Cutters” seems to be living the college dream, but when she comes home to her family, “she just seemed distant and different.”
On the other end of the thematic spectrum, Finn seems to be wrestling (or, more appropriately, brawling) with his Catholic background more than ever. “Don’t tell my sister ‘bout your most recent vision,” he sings in “Slapped Actress,” “Don’t tell my family, they’re all wicked-strict Christian.” “Both Crosses” trades in more informal Jesus-as-homeboy imagery, with conversational lines like, “Hey Judas, I know you made a grave mistake / Hey Peter, you been pretty sweet since Easter break.” Never looking down on the religious, he seems genuinely intrigued by them. If the title of the album is Stay Positive, the thesis is that you’ve got to have faith in something. Maybe it’s Jesus, maybe it’s rock’n’roll, maybe it’s both--remember “Saint” Joe Strummer?--but beneath these tales of the down-and-out lies a redemptive core. As they point out, “It’s one thing to start it with a positive jam, and it’s another thing to see it all through.” No reviewer could put it better.
Reviewer: Ray Padgett
new
Reviewer's Rating: 8.5
Reader's Rating: 10.00
Reader's Votes: 5
Added: 1-Jul-2008
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