On the title track of the Hold Steady’s fourth and latest record,
Stay Positive (in stores this Tuesday), Craig Finn observes,
“It’s one thing to start it with a positive jam/and it’s another thing
to see it on through.” Of course, bands have been singing about the
need to stay positive for about as long as hardcore has been a part of
punk, the Youth of Today and the early 7 Seconds among them.
But when the Hold Steady belt out, “We gotta stay positive,” it’s
more complicated than any straight-ahead youth-crew sloganeering.
There’s a sense of desperation, even defeat, to Finn’s exhortations.
The Hold Steady’s PMA isn’t indomitable, it’s doubtful and quixotic.
Their optimism flies in the face of all reasonable evidence that
things really are fucked. And that tension makes their sing-along songs
a hell of a lot more interesting than any hardcore anthem.
Like much of the Hold Steady’s work, Stay Positive is
concerned with what happens after the sing-along song stops, when the hardcore shows taper off or the parties get busted, when the
barflies and the bands start getting too old. How do you hold on to
youthful ideals—how do you stay positive—in the face of
life’s inevitable disappointments?
Finn has made his name telling stories of hopeless heroines, druggy
hoodrats, and lapsed Catholics, and Stay Positive continues to
look at lives pulled between the lures of nightlife and the realities
of daylight, between religion and rock ‘n’ roll (itself a religion),
between youthful energy and the inevitable decline of aging. The Hold
Steady’s frequently tragic characters may not provide any concrete
answers to the question of how to stay positive, but they make for some
fine cautionary, sometimes inspirational, stories.
“One for the Cutters” borrows broad themes from Breaking
Away—teenage rebellion, small-college-town class
antagonisms—to tell the story of a romance between a college girl
and a townie boy marked by sex and drugs and knife fights. “Lord, I’m Discouraged” finds Finn’s faith wavering as he chases
after/cares for another bruised and bandaged beauty. “Joke About
Jamaica” finds tragedy in the jukebox of a Midwest dive bar and its
patron saint, another tragic, drunk, loose groupie woman, aging and
yearning for glory days, losing her edge as the “new girls are coming
up like some white unopened flowers.” Part “Certain Songs,” part “Glory
Days.”
The title track, for all its subtler concerns, is just a
motherfucker of a Hold Steady anthem, its chorus all rising chords and
gang-chanted “whoa-oh-oh” and the half-inspiring, half-desperate
refrain, “We gotta stay positive.” The verses, too, are some of the
album’s sharpest, with Finn dropping punk/hardcore credentials, talking
about “back in the day… when the Youth of Today and the early 7
Seconds taught [him] some of life’s most valuable lessons” before
invoking past Hold Steady scenes (“there’s gonna come a time/when she’s
gonna have to go/with whoever’s gonna get her the highest,” “the
chaperone crowned us the king and queen… and all those little lambs
from my dreams/well, they were there, too”).
The band’s old album-length narrative threads are seemingly gone for
good, but this album continues the Hold Steady’s
career-long
tradition of self-referentiality and continuity, hiding little
lyrical Easter eggs and returning to old themes that both converse with
and reward longtime fans while providing incentive for new converts to
dig into their back catalog. “Yeah Sapphire” is a sturdy, satisfying
ode to yet another woman beset by prophetic visions, à la “Chips
Ahoy.” Catchy album closer “Slapped Actress” returns to Ybor City (it
almost killed them again), playing at the line between reality and
fiction, Finn as actor versus Finn as confessionalist, acknowledging
that sometimes the fourth wall gets a hole punched in it (“sometimes
actresses get slapped/sometimes fake fights turn out bad”); it would be
pompous navel-gazing if it weren’t such a smart number.
Stay Positive is less consistent than Boys and Girls in
America. “Navy Sheets” is little more than a string of one liners
and a keyboard hook. “Magazines” is another misstep, primarily due to
its weakly pleading chorus. Biblical desert dirge “Both Crosses,” with
its invocations of Jesus and Judas, does nothing so much as recall
superior
mid-album chill-out “Citrus.”
Throughout, though, the band remain adept at the big rock
gestures—windmilling guitars, charging rhythms, trembling then
surging pianos, clap-along breakdowns, great “whoa-oh”
choruses—if not quite stadium-sized, then certainly massive
enough for the summer festival circuit. There are also some
variations on the band’s now well-established outsized bar
rock—the horns on “Sequestered in Memphis” or the tipsy, dancing
harpsichord of “One for the Cutters.”
For all the album’s despair and anxieties, it does, ultimately,
remain positive, and nowhere more than on opening track “Constructive
Summer.” The song is simultaneously a rousing anthem (“We’re gonna
build something this summer!”) built on pounding piano and buzz-saw
guitars and an elegy, with its lyrics about drinking atop water
towers, working “in the mill until you die,” and toasting “saint
Joe Strummer.” The song pulls a neat trick, acknowledging that the
things we build won’t last, that our best efforts will eventually burn
out, but that they’re worth building anyway.