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The Hold Steady are a New York indie rock band for people who hate New York indie rock bands, and their new album chronicles the country's dark underbelly.
By Michaelangelo Matos
Read more: Music, Rock 'n' Roll, Indie Rock, Music Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Michaelangelo Matos
July 14, 2008 | Indie rock is full of annoying voices. Hell, indie rock was founded on annoying voices, from the low, talky Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, to the grating likes of the New York Dolls' David Johansen and the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten, all the way down to Coldplay's whiny Chris Martin and the screechier works of Conor Oberst (aka Bright Eyes).
But standing out even in this company is Craig Finn, the lead singer, lyricist and rhythm guitarist in Brooklyn, N.Y., five-piece the Hold Steady. That's partly because Finn's voice is both nasal and chesty, a whiny bellow that at times seems like it isn't aiming for any notes in particular. (Matador Records co-founder Gerard Cosloy once memorably described Finn and his group as "later-period Soul Asylum fronted by Charles Nelson Reilly.") Still, you can hear on the Hold Steady's new "Stay Positive" that Finn's voice has mellowed with age (he's now 37) and singing lessons. If anything, though, Finn's lyrics -- hyper-detailed, highly allusive, fictional stories about teenage runaways, low-level criminals, copious substance abuse, and the more amusingly desperate edges of the rock lifestyle -- are enhanced by his nasal bark.
The Hold Steady identify as an indie band primarily because they're on Vagrant Records (and before that, the Brooklyn label Frenchkiss). But what they play is closer to '70s AOR -- souped-up and punk-inclusive, but still defined by Tad Kubler's splashy, muscular guitar leads and Franz Nicolay's oft-romantic keyboards; bassist Galen Polivka and drummer Bobby Drake form a tough, nimble rhythm section. Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band is the Hold Steady's most obvious and direct predecessor (and Bruce loves 'em back), but others, like Cheap Trick and Boston, are also in clear sonic evidence. And if the Hold Steady evoke the great mid-American summer road trip, Finn's voice and lyrics expose its dark underbelly.
Finn's music has long offered a kind of trade-off: Stick around even if you think you can't stand his glottal bark, because eventually you will be sucked all the way in. Finn has repeatedly told interviewers his favorite fan correspondence is e-mail from dudes around 40 who lost interest in new music a decade or more ago but plan to get stupid drunk and shout along with every word the next time the Hold Steady come to town.
People hear their lives in this band, just the way Finn heard his in his favorite groups growing up. Finn told me in a 2003 interview, "In hardcore circles, there's a T-shirt that says 'Straightedge Till Death.' And there's another one that says 'Straightedge Till Prom,' because most of the people in hardcore are still underage. So I think of [what I write] as post-prom straightedge songs." Finn's musical roots in hardcore are especially pronounced on "Stay Positive," the Hold Steady's latest album -- especially the title track and the album's opener, "Constructive Summer," in which Finn raises "a toast to Saint Joe Strummer." Alternately spieling like an inspired scoutmaster and the one-time 16-year-old in a basement keeping the hardcore faith, Finn declares, "Let this be my annual reminder/ That we could all be something bigger ... We are our only saviors/ We're gonna build something this summer."
If you go back to Finn and Kubler's previous band, the Minneapolis quartet Lifter Puller, you can start to see what Finn is building. This earlier band was essentially the Hold Steady in embryo, though there are many differences: Kubler played bass, not guitar, and Lifter Puller's sound was wiry art-punk, heavy on needling keyboards, rather than widescreen rock. The band was the hub of a thriving arts and music community in late-'90s Minneapolis, scene kings that no one cared about outside the scene. Part of their appeal was the way Finn portrayed his hometown: Most of Lifter Puller's songs were set there and turned a mostly humdrum city into one crawling with vice, mischief, drugs and action -- a squalid, alluring, David Lynchian vision lurking beneath the bland surfaces. Finn's narrators were the excitable guys insisting they knew where the real action was, and he frequently played their haplessness for laughs. "Fiestas + Fiascos," Lifter Puller's 2000 swan song, includes one character yelping, "Woke up in the grass with the assless chaps!"
When the band dissolved in late 2000, Finn and Kubler both made their way to Brooklyn; the Hold Steady began playing in early 2003. Originally a quartet, the Hold Steady deliberately stayed away from the new wave keyboards, brisk tempos, condensed structures and lack of choruses that had characterized Lifter Puller. On "The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me," the band's 2004 debut, Finn still set many of his songs in the Twin Cities, but he sounded more amused than bug-eyed, sloshing alongside the ridiculous characters and lost dingbats he was now chronicling, while Kubler set out to re-create the guitar leads from his melted classic-rock car tapes -- right enough to catch their essence, wrong enough not to get sued.
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