When I saw that The Hold Steady's front man had a solo album
coming out, two questions immediately sprang to mind for me: why would someone whose vision seemingly so
dominates his band need to make a solo record and will it be better than The Hold Steady's disappointing last album? The short answers, respectively are as
follows: because the music is much
different than anything The Hold Steady would do, even if the lyrics are pretty
much the same as ever and yes,
thankfully.
Let's expand on those two answers a bit. If you've ever heard anything Finn has been
responsible for, be it The Hold Steady, Lifter Puller, or this solo album, then
you're likely already aware that he's an extremely able, clever wordsmith with
a frustratingly limited topical scope.
As ever, these eleven songs can be reduced to their thematic lowest
common denominators of drinking/drugs/parties, the poor choices one makes as a
result of drinking/drugs/parties, and religion.
As with the last two Hold Steady albums, I'll take this moment to
register my running complaint: it would be refreshing to hear someone as gifted
with words as Finn challenge himself to write about something different. After all these years and albums, he's edging
ever closer to shticky self-parody, and the brutally honest side of my brain
knows that I may well have only included the "edging ever closer"
qualifier to that sentence because I am a fan.
So the lyrics are what they are, and are what they will
likely always remain, and who needs 'em?
The music is Clear Heart Full Eyes'
giant pleasant surprise, setting Finn's ever-improving speak-singing to a
quiet, gentile, '70s inspired restrained-rock gait that sounds like a potential
mismatch on paper but plays out wonderfully on record. Where The Hold Steady posits Finn as a sort
of post-punk Springsteen, here he reinvents himself as a sort of indie-rock
Steve Miller, whose drug-addled protagonists take the money and run, ambling
off into the earth-toned sunset of 1976 with Jesus as their co-pilot or maybe
not. Finn's backing band understand this
music perfectly, injecting it with enough rambling grace to make the record
warm and welcoming, but never generating so much heat as to upstage their star
narrator. I can imagine totally zoning
out to this record come the summer, sitting on a lawn chair at a beach
somewhere, cooler by my side, losing myself in the narrative no matter how
silly and clichéd it might actually be.
This is a remarkably consistent record; Finn clearly had a sound and vibe
in mind for it, which he and his band find within the first minute or so and
never lose sight of. If some of it
begins to feel a bit samey by record's end, well, it also has no bad songs to
speak of - and that's something that can't be said for either of the last two
Hold Steady albums. (Two? Yup; while I adore Stay Positive as a whole, "One for the Cutters" is a
terrible song.)
In many ways, Clear
Heart Full Eyes is the polar opposite of Heaven is Whenever, The Hold Steady's last-and-least album. Where that album attempted to disguise its
diminished songwriting quality in a haze of spit-shiny production, this one
makes both a virtue and a selling point of its casual, off-the-cuff feel. It's a record of quiet confidence, and I hope
that it leads Finn to return to his main band with its success under his arm, and
from there that they might find a way to plug the hole in the shape of departed
keyboardist Franz Nicolay in their sound and come up with something once again
on the quality level of their first four LPs.
Not something that sounds exactly like them - they've already been there
and done that, after all - but something as artistically exciting as them. In the meantime, Clear Heart Full Eyes is a big step in the right direction.
No comments:
Post a Comment