Boys and Girls in America — The Hold Steady
Vagrant
2006
Rating:


The Hold Steady has grown in leaps and bounds since its debut album "Almost Killed Me" in 2004. The band initially couldn't transcend its bar band beginnings, largely because all of the songs on "Almost Killed Me" were about a bar band. Last year's "Separation Sunday" was a concept album that featured The Hold Steady blossoming with stronger songwriting and dense instrumentation.

"Boys and Girls in America" further develops the promise first displayed on "Separation Sunday" and improves upon it. The Hold Steady has always wanted to be an arena rock band, and here it comes closer to that goal, with frontman Craig Finn approximating a singing voice for once and his lyrics less conceptual in an attempt to make the songs more universal to all those boys and girls in America.

Finn still knows how to craft a fine character, though, and "Separation Sunday's" Hallelujah Holly, Charlemagne and Gideon return here in "First Night." While "Charlemagne pulls street corner scams" and "Gideon's got a pipe made from a Pringle's can," Holly is in the hospital, a changed woman. No longer "golden with barlight and beer," Holly is now "inconsolable, unhinged and uncontrollable because we can't get as high as we did that first night."

Listeners are likely to more easily relate to "Chillout Tent," about kids who converge on a concert in western Massachusetts whose attempts to escape boredom causes them to overdose on mushrooms and pills, landing them in the titular "Chillout Tent" eating oranges and smoking cigarettes. Far from endorsing such bacchanalia, Finn later sings on "Chips Ahoy!" "How am I supposed to know that you're high if you won't let me touch you?"

All of these lyrics and characterizations are delivered over the band's most classic rock-worthy melodies to date. "Stuck Between Stations" may invoke "Dream Songs" writer John Berryman for a cautionary tale about alcohol-fueled poetry, but the sound is all Springsteen thanks to Franz Nicolay's piano and Tad Kubler's crisp guitar. "You Can Make Him Like You" is less classic rock revivalism than classic rock resurrection, a song that has the 1970s in its veins and raw emotion in its blood.

Holly warns, "words alone never could save us" on "First Night," but Finn is a mighty poet. He'd have to be, considering "Boys and Girls in America" is a reference to a line narrator Sal Paradise says in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road": "Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together." Finn explores that sadness in his tales, but, with the skill of other generational music poets like Mike "The Streets" Skinner and Arctic Monkeys, he also takes great pains to emphasize the boys and girls are sad together. And somewhere they're surely in a chillout tent listening to "Boys and Girls in America."

Posted Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/music/hold.steady/boys.and.girls.in.america