Stay Positive

by

The Hold Steady

Edit

News of the new Hold Steady album raised a lot of questions. Could it possibly live up to the escalating expectations their first three albums produced? Will the familiar characters of the past be back? Can Craig Finn keep writing the wittiest lyrics in rock music? Will every review make a Springsteen comparison? The answer to all of these questions is yes.

Stay Positive was released in digital form last month and like it's predecessors gets off to a rocking start with "Constructive Summer" which revisits Boys and Girls in America's theme of partying with friends while tossing in a toast to "St. Joe Strummer" who "might have been our only decent teacher". "Sequestered in Memphis" keeps the rocking party going but throws some shadows in the lyrics. There are subpoenas and sequesters, and the lyrics seem to be the response to an interrogation. In Craig Finn's addled world you don't go back to her place when you leave the bar, you go to "someplace where she cat sits".

When a harpsicord leads off the third song "One for the Cutters" you start to realize you may not be in Minnesota anymore. Kids are being killed, suspects are on the run, and every townie is being paraded to the police station. What follows in the album are the consequences to the partying. Characters are older but not wiser, and aging but not gracefully. Holly (who like Gideon and Charlemagne are never named) may be in worse shape than where she was left in the song "First Night" from BAGIA. "Lord I'm Discouraged", a heartbreaking ballad with a monster guitar solo finds the singer pining away for her and praying "she don't die".

Even the title track "Stay Positive" warns "There's gonna time a time when the scene'll seem less sunny." and begins a great four song sequence that culminates with "Slapped Actress" which may be the best song The Hold Steady has ever released. The song, influenced by the John Cassavetes movie "Opening Night" sways back and forth between re-examining the events in previous albums "Don't tell them Ybor City almost killed us again" and exploring the relationship between the performer and the fans "Some nights, it's just entertainment and some other nights it's work".

If you are a Hold Steady fan "Stay Positive" has the comforting themes, name and song dropping, intertwined lyrics and explosive sound you are used to. If not "Stay Positive" may be the album that will make you go back to find out what happened before this, as BAGIA was for me. In any event it is The Hold Steady's most musically diverse album to date, with a storyline that can stand up to the brilliant "Separation Sunday", something even the most positive Hold Steady fan may be surprised by.

I love the Hold Steady. "Boys and Girls in America" is one of the best albums I've ever heard. That said, "Stay Positive" is testing my ability to do just that. The album certainly has a lot of redeeming moments, but overall it doesn't quite cut it. It's stripped down, but in a bad way. Gone is the raw intensity and "get off your a$$" riffs that make their previous albums so memorable. This one is just a little too overproduced, and not quite genuine enough. Boys and Girls makes our high school and college drug and induced adventures and antics sound like the dramatic and meaningful experiences that they felt like at the time. Stay Positive tries to do the same, but its corniness is making me wonder if I need to grow up.