Hold Steady - Borderline, London, 17//2/2007

  by Chris O'Toole

published: 12 / 2 / 2007

intro

Despite the massive publicity surrounding garage rock outfit and lyrical American rockers the Hold Steady, Chris O' Toole is uninspired by their performance at a gig at the London Borderline on their first British tour

Following the demise of their former outfit, Lifter Puller, vocalist Craig Finn and guitarist Tad Kubler relocated to New York in circa 2000 and began recording under the handle the Hold Steady. Three albums later and the band have earned themselves a reputation as the hard-drinking-silver-tongue-talking voices of disenfranchised disillusionment. In 2007 they represent the epicentre of a new Americana; a freewheeling, loose living version of an American dream that exists only under the flickering neon lights of the cheapest bars in a broken down tinsel town. This reputation is built on the secure foundations of Finn’s lilting, poetic narratives and the crashing riffs of Tad Kubler. Finn, however, is the focus of the Hold Steady. It is his rambling, pseudo-intellectual, literary yarns that occupy centre stage, detailing American youth through a litany of archetypal halfwit hoaxers, hard drinkers, young hoodlums and shop-worn prom queens. Through their stories the characters detail their hard fought victories, momentous regrets and quiet failure to the listener, creating a vivid tapestry of modern American life. These narratives are then framed by the arena sized guitar playing or Tad Kubler and bravura keyboard skills of recent addition Franz Nicolay. Together Nicolay and Kubler craft loose fitting jam rock; sprawled out in the backseat of a stolen Cadillac and breaking the speed limit out in the desert. The appearance is effortless, but this is the work of a finely honed unit, in tune with both the needs of Finn’s narratives and the expectations of their growing audience. It is the great success of the Hold Steady that when these two elements are combined they move the band's personal narrative in the universal, sharing their experience of the world with the audience to create an everyman narrative. The characters are all taken from an American context, but applied to a global audience, with enough single line biographies to raise a wry smile of remembrance or regret from each individual listener. Finn’s authentic examinations of human relationships are amplified by Kubler’s playing to build a fully convincing history of adolescent experimentation. As Kubler himself explains the band aim to examine that stage of your life when you have the blind optimism of youth, all the answers and the looks, but when you are also still so utterly naïve; reminiscing over the times when the world was at your feet and when you could drink your body weight in Tequila slammers before skipping to school the next day. With this manifesto developing over their previous two albums, 'Almost Killed Me' and 'Separation Sunday', the Hold Steady reached their apogee with 'Boys and Girls in America' during 2006. Levels of hysterical hyperbole began to swirl around the band as they were at once heralded as bookish academics and hard drinking brawlers. The hype reached such a point that you would expect one of their live shows to rank up there with the Gettysburg Address or the Alamo in terms of social importance, so it was with great expectation that the Borderline waited. Tonight is a showcase for the new album. The title is taken from 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac and is a loose concept based around the writer’s ideas of social observation and documentation. The lyrics are not autobiographical, but instead sketched reports from a variety of subterranean environments, observations of niche lives painted large for all to see. Finn has examined what he believes to be universal intimate human relationships, hoping to transcend the generations and present his findings through the medium of rock and roll. The characters he uses are not real individuals, but vehicles in which his observations travel, illuminating his findings to the listener. With 'Boys and Girls in America' the band have aimed for a more democratic song writing process, with Finn’s narratives pushed slightly lower in the mix, thus allowing the musical contributions of the Hold Steady to stand alone for the first time. It is a shared experiment between keys and guitar, creating panoramic scope and giving space for exploration, but still very much within the confines of rock. There are more attempts on 'Girls and Boys in America' at song structures, more repeated choruses and refrains, moving away from the roving dialogue that characterised their earlier work. For example 'Citrus' is a ballad, built around a finger picked guitar chord rather than a monster riff, and marks a departure for the band. Live, however, it becomes apparent that all these literary pretensions and grand panoramic views are pushed to once side. The Hold Steady is a rock 'n' roll band, pure and simple, aiming for the purest good time. The quote that comes up relentlessly in their biographies and press is that if you go to a Hold Steady gig, you had better take the next day off work and push it as far as you can. Let’s not forget that one of the band is still a mechanic and two of the others are professional bartenders; this is their shot at the big time. They intend to enjoy it. The Hold Steady thrives on the atmosphere of the occasion, and as they grow in stature the symbiotic circle of growth continues; the band feeding from the audience and the audience feeding from the band. On this, their first UK tour proper, the Hold Steady revel in their success, showing the passion and they have become notorious for and acknowledging that people are finally coming to see them. For a band built so heavily around their live show, the Hold Steady, however, largely fails to deliver. The speak-sing vocal delivery of Finn is lost in the melee and it is difficult to make out all but the most obvious sing-a-long chorus lines. It is obvious he is enjoying the show, but on occasion he fails to take the crowd along in his jubilation and gains only a muted response at the end of tracks. Perhaps most importantly the notion that the tracks somehow transcend generational barriers is exposed as false. This looks like a jaded rock band singing about the life experiences they enjoyed a decade or more ago. They are singing to a young crowd, still revelling in those experiences, and having them examined under halogen lights, no matter how eloquently, is rather like taking advice from your father. You still think you know better. Live the band lack the gravitas to make the crowd party as the so hope they will. The lyrical intricacies and musical idiosyncrasies that separate the Hold Steady from their contemporaries are lost in the desperate scramble to have a good time. Whilst they have been downing drinking and gaining fans faster than their beat predecessors, this was based principally on their recorded output, an impressive three albums in three years, but translated into the confines of a backstreet London venue the verve and literacy that makes the Hold Steady shine is somewhat lost. In this context they essentially remain a slightly above average bar band, they play for themselves and hope that the crowd come along for the ride; sometimes they do, the majority of the time they don’t.

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