THE HOLD STEADYStay Positive
(Vagrant)
**** (out of 5)
I’m sure plenty of kids growing up in small Midwestern mill towns die in car accidents, in bar fights, and maybe even in suicides, but I never heard of anyone literally getting crucified until I listened to Stay Positive, the new album by critical darling bar-band The Hold Steady. Song after song on the disc references this shadowy event—“Sequestered in Memphis” takes place at a police interrogation, “One for the Cutters” tells the story from the point of view of a thrill-seeking college girl who enjoys slumming with the townies, and “Both Crosses” retells the event in an even more hallucinatory fashion—and at a certain point, the event stops sounding like some lurid piece of summertime gossip and enters the realm of shared small-town myth.
Turning everyday tragedies and heartbreaks into myth: few bands do it better than The Hold Steady. Craig Finn has a novelist’s eye not just for detail but for character and narrative—a rarity in a songwriter—while his bandmates supply joyous wall-of-sound arrangements as wild and innocent as anything the E Street Band ever came up with. Four albums into their career, and The Hold Steady show no signs of wavering.
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