The Hold Steady
Separation Sunday
French Kiss Records

The Hold Steady has been called the country's best bar band. It's been called the re-inventer of '70s biker rock. Craig Finn, the band's frontman, has been feted for his literary pedigree, and compared to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon. But the ideal home for the band's music is not the bar, the Sturgis bike rally or the East Village poetry slam. It's the car. If you live in the Midwest — perhaps in a town like Adrian, Michigan, 22,000 people strong, wanting for a nightlife, striped with long, meandering country roads past cow pastures and untended cornfields, and 20 minutes from the border of Lyons, Ohio, where a high-schooler with decent beard growth can buy beer for his buddies without much hassle* — then Separation Sunday is the disc you want blaring out the back windows during your aimless weekend driving.

* Note: This was the author's hometown, and he grew his first beard at 17.

Finn, along with Hold Steady member Tad Kubler (lead guitar), moved to New York City in 2000, leaving their less-accomplished band Lifter Puller behind. They added Galen Polivka (bass) and, later, Franz Nicolay (keyboards), and released Almost Killed Me in 2004, on which the Hold Steady's formula erupted, fully formed. First, there's the riffs. A hypothetical may be in order here, though the band is only two albums in: Will the Hold Steady ever release a song with an average-sounding riff? Or, heaven forbid, a bad one? The band is 21 songs old, and every riff is huge, and every melody is insistent. Kubler and Finn were weaned on Midwestern radio stations, and in their youth, there was no real alternative radio station available, at least one they had the wherewithal to hunt down on the dial. "Classic rock was about as good as it got," Finn told Splendid magazine.

The Hold Steady holds a seminar on classic rock riffs on both albums. Listen to those Fender guitar clicks in the rhythm guitar line of "Your Little Hoodrat Friend." Listen to the thick horn section and the swirling keyboards of "Banging Camp" and try not to envision a live concert on the Jersey shore, circa 1981, headlined by the Boss. Listen, on any number of tracks, but especially on "Cattle and the Creeping Things," to the snare drum beats and the bass kicks issuing like gunshots. Listen to "Stevie Nix," to that chunka-chunka low-end punch of guitar with which guitar gods established their bonafides in the late '70s. There is great respect for the history of guitar rock in the Hold Steady's performance; it recalls an era when the enormity and audacity of the power chord was redemptive, and when a guitar giant offered a riff up like a weightlifter performing a clean and press, the audience would erupt. It's euphoric, and plenty sexual; as Sasha Frere-Jones reported in the New Yorker, when the Hold Steady were three songs into a recent set at the Bowery Ballroom, a woman said of Finn, who looks like nothing so much as the guy in the mail room at work who knows a lot of trivia about renaissance Europe, "He's the sexiest man alive." That's the power of rock, my friends.

The second half of the Hold Steady formula is the lyrics. This represents the marriage of the Hold Steady's punk impulse and rap verbal virtuosity (Lifter Puller was arguably a more indie-punk unit) to the guitar rock score. Finn's recorded voice has the punk disaffection of Lou Reed. He's not a singer, and rarely even attempts it; instead, he pretty much shouts everything, and while his phrasing lacks the expressiveness of other non-singing rockers, he still gets his messages across. And what a lot of material he has to get across: Finn's lyric-writing is torrential. Words press against the margins of songs, and Finn weaves story after story together, referencing locations and characters from Almost Killed Me, occupying himself with Catholicism, the mythology of rock, casual drug use, teen lust and the sad disappointments of a life lived in "the scene." Finn is drawn to rap's verbiage-heavy verses, and cites Brother Ali as a particular inspiration. His lyrics, like rap, are overloaded, but also propulsive.

On "Charlemagne in Sweatpants," Finn decides how to best tell his song's stories:

Do you want me to tell it like it's textbook history/ Or do you want it like a murder mystery?/ I'm gonna tell it like a comeback story,/ 'Cause when we left we were defeated and depressed/ And when we arrived we were ripping high./ We had a gun in the glove box./ We had some sweet stuff tucked into our socks./ We had Jesus Christ in all his glory.

On the final track, "How a Resurrection Really Feels," Finn sings about one of his "desperate characters," Holly/Hallelujah, a girl caught between the impulses of youth and the strictures of religion:

The priest just kinda laughed/ The deacon caught a draft/ She crashed into the Easter Mass/ With her hair done up in broken glass/ She was limping left on a broken heel/ When she said, "Father —/ Can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?"

Holly's story, like the others woven into Separation Sunday's songs, resonates precisely because Finn sings about a world he understands deeply. "It's a suburban teenaged world, where I feel like ... after I got my driver's license, parents and teachers, everyone stopped mattering to me," he has said. "There's this teenaged world where people are kind of living and dying every day. That's sort of how I envision it." It is Finn's particular gift to be able to set the listener smack in the middle of his songs, seeing what he sees, caring about the lives he chronicles. It is the listener's reward to find these stories scored by big, fat monster hooks, and effortless piano-driven melodies. The music is celebratory; it only works on the car stereo if you turn it up real loud.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)