Destination Anywhere
There is a point on Boys and Girls in America that marks the line the Hold Steady has apparently crossed. It’s the chorus on the second track, a churning anthem dubbed “Chips Ahoy!” It’s a bit hard to tell just what Craig Finn is singing (singing?) because he can’t quite shout loud enough to be heard over a traffic-jam racket of backing vocals and monolithic rhythm/piano/organ/guitar/guitar/guitar/guitar! noise.
Welcome to the new(ish) Hold Steady: slicker, more obvious (if more relatable), more riffs, more force, more exclamation points, more debt to the classic-rock company store, more backup singers, and more melody from Finn, owner of rock’s greatest hectoring narrative yell. If “less is more” — as guitarist Tad Kubler described the formative structure of this record — this album must’ve been made with practically nothing.
Which is about the worst you can say about it, really. It’s good to hear the band pushing the epic reach of its music to match the epic reach of its everything-else, and if that dredges up a litany of Springsteen comparisons, so be it. Other critics cite Thin Lizzy; given the Hold Steady’s interest in Irish Catholic imagery, paired guitars, drinking, and rhyming phrases with Phil Lynott, that makes plenty of sense, too. And we can throw another name into the mix: Minneapolis’ Lifter Puller, particularly the band as it existed in 1997, when Half Dead and Dynamite heralded its metamorphosis from a Midwestern pseudo-Pavement into mythmaking indie-hard-rock cult hero.
Finn was the only member of Lifter Puller who went immediately to the Hold Steady (Kubler didn’t join until the following year), and on Half Dead more than any other Lifter Puller or Hold Steady album, he foreshadowed Boys and Girls in America: less an enigmatic fable about a scene and a core group of people than a loosely strung series of moments and places, sung in a voice more concerned with conveying mood than with providing narrative detail.
Not that the world outlined in Boys and Girls is without detail. A couple of songs still skirt that familiar young-and-wasted turf: “Chillout Tent” has a darkly funny premise — two kids on some bad stuff hook up amid a crowd of comatose OD victims (They started kissin’ when the nurses took off their IVs/It was kinda sexy, but it was kinda creepy).
The prom scenario of “Massive Night” is filled with giggly Steve Nieve keyboards that add some lightheadedness to Finn’s paeans to teenage debauchery (The dance floor was crowded, the bathrooms were worse/We kissed in your car, and we drank from your purse).
Lyrics aside, the Hold Steady plays like a tight-knit unit of social drinkers. And the uncanny sense of navigation that Finn’s Twin Cities background necessitated has sprawled outward: Take Lyndale to the horizon/Take Nicollet out to the ocean, he directs on the closing “Southtown Girls” — not so much aimless as it is beholden to the idea that you can get anywhere from here. If you’ve got a reason to leave, at least.
