Playlouder - Music is the Network

In 2005, a couple of weeks after The Hold Steady released their second album, Separation Sunday, I ended up being made redundant from the first ever full-time job, a 37.5 hour dream job, the one I'd fantasized about doing for nine years. It was a modest dream, and although my lifelong ambition wasn't really to spend long afternoons selling Taking Back Sunday CDs to kids too lazy to cross the street to the independent across the road, it was as fun as you could feasibly imagine. And then it was gone. Dismantling the echoey ghostly shell of the building, and packing all the forgotten CDs, the hundred or so excess copies of X and Y, and unsold copies of School of Rock with peeled-off sticker debris across Jack Black's face into cardboard boxes and seeing them carted off on lorries was a sad and sobering experience. The two week period of monolithic long afternoons, briefly brightened by trolley rides across the open floor once the shelves were removed, and taking a mallet the counter to split it in two and pack the pieces into a carrier bag, were horrendous. We had to keep turning people away from the doors who though, even though the group of five of us were sat on cardboard boxes drinking coffee with water boiled in a kettle wired to the mains where the compilations chart used to be. During this time, the only CDs allowed in the building by the auditors were compilations we'd brought in ourselves. Every single day mine was played at least once. I can still remember exactly what was on it. 1-11 were tracks 1-11 of Separation Sunday by The Hold Steady, an album I'd downloaded and instantly attempted to import within the final bars of the opening song. Track 12 was Killer Parties, the last track from the first Hold Steady album I hadn't heard yet. Track 13 was Do the Whirlwind by Architecture in Helsinki, although that, and the rest were insignificant. Listening to the album gave a strange sort of hope, we all knew we were working harder than we'd ever done in our miniature lives, for literally no reward except the chance to be unemployed quicker, but because of The Hold Steady I remember this week fondly. This was July. I spent the entire summer on the dole.

In 2006, the third Hold Steady album, Boys and Girl in America was released, no more than a year and a half later than Separation Sunday. I'd somehow chewed my way through an entire new job and redundancy in that time, a record I'd challenge someone to beat if I weren't feeling to sorry for them. I heard Boys and Girls in America for the first time two weeks after coming out of hospital. The 11 tracks held within the confinements of the album soundtracked the next four months spent kicking my heels against chairs in a wide assortment of mental health institutions in South Wales. The same rules applied, although the experience of time meant the relentless positivity of songs like Stuck Between Stations and You Can Make Him Like You probably made a terrible thing less terrible, and in a bizarre kind of way, I miss that time of having the bar room joviality of Party Pit and nuclear blast of Same Kooks as a bedside companion after another forced day off work.

2007 didn't see a new Hold Steady album, which was quite a relief for myself and presumably my future biographer, and parents, and alas, there isn't an overwhelming crisis hovering like a black cloud over my house, unless Craig Finn and The Hold Steady know something I don't, but still, The Hold Steady were, almost inconveniently, a completely unrivalled musical experience, and therefore morbid crisis or hopeless situation or not, it comes around that the almost perfectly titled Stay Positive is uniformly awesome, and almost as good as three quarters of an hour of music can possibly get. Again.

Although, it's worth pointing out that the marked differences between the slack and patchy debut and the quasi-blue-collar-rock-opera bonanza package of Seperation Sunday was a gap the size of an ocean, and the jump through to the slick and refined Boys and Girls… was just as big, there isn't so much of a giant leap this time. If we're being honest, this is more of a follow up to that, than the next progressional step. Which is no bad thing of course, and literally to the second that Constructive Summer kicks in, you know whose party you're at, and it's gaining momentum for a fourth consecutive year. Constructive Summer a swatted blast against procrastination, is arguably the most compacted atom bomb of a song the band have put their name to yet. The trademarks are all there: The undiluted E Street, shot through a gauze of Replacements, Kiss and pop punk, the pounding piano that's pure WK, and pop culture references barked at you like a darts commentator "Me and my friends are like, the drums from Lust For Life". That's the first line. It's like a scabbier, more playful take on Stuck Between Stations, but with it's relentless pounding and many-tentacled riffing, it's misleading simplicity is what makes it such a joy.

The Hold steady are one of the few bands that have achieved first class honours in both leading fields of songwriting. Although Craig Finn's haggard drawl operates on the same degree of acquired taste is ever has, and you pray, ever will, the lyrical dexterity of each individual track as the narrative unfolds is also present: pick any lyric sheet out of a hat and you can you'll run out of fingers before you run out of picking terrific one-liners, and brilliant self references, harking back to the tales of punked-out parties, Ybor city, redemption; even quoting entire lines from previous songs on barnstorming closer Slapped Actress, and once again the ease of tumbling back into the hazy world of good-time drinkery, partying, and the hazardous characters indulging in both activities. "Excuses and half truths, and fortified wine, there's a house on the south side she stay in for days at a time" coos Finn on Lord, I'm Discouraged, a classic fable of overdoing it, the familiar character of Holly which Separation Sunday revolves around, although never named, remains a focal point. But it is, of course, the soundtracking of Finn's vignettes which complete the package, and The Hold Steady, finally settled as a touring band and productive unit, this time around are tighter, more free and indulgent, and the better for it. The solo that piles in between choruses on the aforementioned Lord... is one indicator, the Born to Run glockenspiel which spills out out over the closing bars on the exact same song is another. The band sound is fuller, bigger and more intuitive to each other than previously.

There's even a bit of wild abandon thrown in. If Boys and Girls in America's Citrus was the signal that they could nail toned-down and reflective as well as rail-rocking, then the double-bill of One for the Cutters and Both Crosses here are reference points for the bands ever increasing diversity. The former, a harpsichord-led waltz that lends itself more to the yokel sound of the Drive By Truckers (whose Patterson Hood provides backing vocals elsewhere) or Willard Grant Conspiracy than the expected blue collar crush, and Both Crosses, a highlight, takes it darker still, a song built around a drone and dense lyrics like "Baby let's transverberate" over plucked strings which sound cut straight from the cloth of the best Sixteen Horsepower or Woven Hand darkened folklore. Then it's straight back into hammering the Hammonds, and escalating power chords of the title track, complete with woahs and hollers, and is the quintessential Hold Steady song, about retaining a keen face in spite of the awkwardness and forgotten dreams. It's almost a best of compacted into one song: The line "there's gonna come a time, when she's gonna have to go, with whoever’s gonna get her the highest",  Positive Jam, both lines lifted from the opening tracks of Separation Sunday and Almost Killed Me... respectively, and the arms-wide, vivacious and unstoppable happiness, a song tailor made for the fans, it's typical from a band afraid to rest on their laurels or indeed, accept their own responsibility for their good fortune. It would have been almost too easy in the success circus in the last couple of years and bore the world to tears with tales of playing draughts with Ronnie Wood, or whatever rock stars do these days, but no. There's even time for a leg-up, with guest vocals from Lucero's Ben Nichols, a band fit for the ultimate co-headline tour, Gods permitting.

There's a thousand more things, but one of the best things about any Hold Steady album is unraveling the plots, spotting the pop culture one-liners, the self references, the knowing winks to the FM radio greats. For anyone casting a passing gaze, rest assured that Stay Positive is all the above yet more. It's the essential party album for whiskey freaks and casual music geeks. It is, quite simple, fucking brilliant.