The Hold Steady- Boys And Girls In America

Enough with this bar band shit. Seriously. This band sounds nothing like the type of band you’re likely to encounter if you hit just about any bar in any city. If bar bands sounded like this Top 40 radio would be a beautiful thing, American Idol wouldn’t exist, and we may have even spared ourselves from W (sorry I can’t even type his name anymore without feeling sick).

Can you imagine what it would look like? Every small town would be a ripe scene waiting to explode. It’d be like having a 1959 Liverpool, 1967 San Francisco, 1977 London and 1989 Seattle everyday in every small town. “Good to see you’re back in a bar band, baby.” Yeah, maybe at the type of joint you’d find in Minneapolis in 1984.

The Replacements, Husker Du, and the Minneapolis scene of the early 1980’s feature prominently in the Hold Steady’s approach. Like Westerberg, Craig Finn wouldn’t be in a band if he had nothing to say. Fortunately for us, he’s got plenty to say, but he’s abandoned the unfocused jazz approach the got him so many comparisons to early pre-Born To Run Springsteen albums.

Boys And Girls In America is all about economy. Lead Singer/Lecturer Craig Finn sounds like he’s part of the band instead of competing with them. Gone are the long narratives found on 2004’s Almost Killed Me and especially last years concept heavy Separation Sunday, and in their place are concise rock songs. Most feature pronounced piano and restrained guitar. Some of which Craig Finn even manages to sing on.

The album kicks off with “Stuck Between Stations” and tells an interesting story about the poet John Berryman, Minneapolis and drinking. “He was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected/He loved the golden gophers but he hated all the drawn out winters”. Alcohol gets the best of him (“he likes the warm feeling but he’s tired of all the dehydration”) before he leaps to his death and drowns in the Mississippi river. Hard lesson. You have to wonder if there isn’t a little band commentary in there.

The album’s other highlights include “Chips Ahoy”, “Massive Nights” and the very Cheap Trickish “Southtown Girls”. Boys And Girls In America’s greatest strengths come with its biggest detours. “Citrus” is a lovely ode to romance and inebriation, and oftentimes the romance of inebriation. Religion creeps its way in as well “I feel Jesus in the tenderness of honest nervous lovers/I feel Judas in the pistols and the pagers that come with all the powders.”

The real highlight is “First Night”. The song is where Craig Finn’s storytelling comes full circle as he resurrects Holly from Separation Sunday. Piano driven with layers of strings and guitars underneath, this song is The Hold Steady as probably nobody could have imagined them just a few years earlier. Indeed, if bar bands sounded like this, it would only be a matter of time before this song would penetrate a prom or two somewhere along the way.

Boys And Girls In America does have a few missteps, most notably “Same Kooks”. Guitarist Tad Kubler is wonderfully restrained on most of the album, but when he lets loose here the song can’t really support it. Elsewhere “You Can Make Him Like You” seems a little pedestrian, and “Chillout Tent” suffers a bit from the guest appearances even if the subject matter and song itself are pretty strong.

But none of that really matters. What really counts here is how brilliant the storytelling and lyrics are on the bulk of the record. Nobody comes close to Craig Finn at his most focused. And there’s plenty of focus here, lyrically and musically. Oh, and it rocks. If only all bar bands were this way.