The Hold Steady – “Boys and Girls in America”

There’s a grab bag of adjectives and easy comparisons people tend to dip into when talking about The Hold Steady. Early Bruce Springsteen or The Replacements get mentioned a lot. Words like “literary” or “rock” or “arena sized riffs”. Shopping malls, cheap mass-produced drugs, girls who never made the cheer-leader squad (and never tried out), disaffected suburban youth and so on.

The problem with trying to address the new record (which is every bit as thrilling as their first two) is that all of these things are true to some extent but never come across as cliches. The tunes are huge. Finn’s lyrics are smart, witty, humane, passionate, unafraid of telling a story without irony or condescension. He’s like the detective in Rumblefish, if there’d been the right kind of detective, the one who’d look at the gang with a reflective, understanding eye, make a note and not interfere beyond a casual “You know that isn’t good for you, right? Yeah, I thought so.”

It’s hard to express just how…technicolor this album is. It’s kind of a musical Catcher in the Rye set in nineties New Jersey for people wondering what exactly it was they spent their adolescence on ten years later. And yes, it’s every bit as good as those early Bruce records (the piano is right up front and it sounds marvellous). But it’s also nothing like them whatsoever. This isn’t a mythology – the delienation of the world of characters like Charlemagne is a pathology of some kind.

So how come it sounds like such a celebration? I could pick out individual tracks but the whole album is a rush, a good, healthy rush, that makes you want to get up and keep on going. And jump around some. It’s in the whine and snap of the singing, the colossal drumming and guitars that roar and stomp like an army of Keefs. You can always go back and read the lyrics later.

Some mp3 and so on can be found at the official website.