The Hold Steady - Stay Positive
Vagrant/Shock
By Andrew P Street
We don’t give out six stars for nothing.
Sure, The Hold Steady haven’t done a less-than-stellar album in their career, and 2006’s Boys & Girls In America was in some ways the definitive distillation of Craig Finn’s very particular worldview. However, four albums in, that well of inspiration shows no signs of drying up. From the second that ‘Constructive Summer’ bursts out of the speakers with the sort of punk-informed classic American rock that REM dealt in circa 1984’s Reckoning it’s clear that there are endless stories to be told about bored, confused suburban kids into bands, drugs, sex, Jesus and the hardcore scene.
Stay Positive is also easily The Hold Steady’s most explicitly Catholic album, even compared with 2005’s faith-drugs-‘n’-fucking-all-but-concept-album Separation Sunday: characters are having visions of angels (‘Slapped Actress’), reconciling their faith with their baser impulses (‘Yeah Sapphire’) or preparing for the rapture (‘Both Crosses’). Musically the band head off in some unexpected directions: ‘One For The Cutters’ rests on filigreed harpsichord trills and ‘Both Crosses’ is a down-tuned blues drone. However, there are plenty of classic Hold Steady bar-band moments, such as the lively ‘Sequestered In Memphis’, ‘Magazines’ and ‘Navy Sheets’. The ballad ‘Lord, I’m Discouraged’ even has a genuinely-bitchin’ guitar solo, yet it makes it even more awesome. That takes some doing.
While the entire disc is superb, there are two must-hear tracks: the closing ‘Slapped Actress’ is the sort of glorious, emotive, over-saturated guitar song that Weezer seem incapable of doing these days, but the central track is ‘Stay Positive’, the best song about loving The Scene ever written. Fans will giggle at the sheer weight of reconstituted lines from previous Hold Steady tracks, but when Finn insists that “we gotta stay positive,” dammit, you can’t help but concur.