...The Hold Steady, Phoenix Concert Theater, July 16th

Our song are singalong songs


When one thinks of hipster bands, the kinds written about in the AV Club and who get the highest rating possible from Pitchfork (8.2), one thinks of The Hold Steady. Craig Finn's songs are densely layered tales of outsider drama. Many of them feature recurring characters who roam Finn's hometown of Minneapolis (even though the band is now located in Brooklyn). They have a large bombastic sweep that almost compels one to re-write their own history to fit into the stories. As such, he often gets described as the new Bruce Springsteen.



The Hold Steady played the Phoenix Concert Theater, a smaller club/hall that is reminding me after every concert why it is my favorite venue in the city. The show was originally supposed to be at the cavernous Kool Haus, but the move to the smaller club fit the band well: Something about The Hold Steady demands a hot night and a sticky club.

Seeing The Hold Steady live, I couldn't held but be struck by a couple of things:

The Hold Steady are classic rockers stuck in hipster bodies. The songs are big and loud and churning, and not in the Arcade Fire/British Sea Power faux-prog rock model. They are loud. They are bellowed. They feature twin guitar leads and, yes, singalong choruses. If Smashing Pumpkins were the Alt-rock Boston, you could argue that The Hold Steady are the Indie Bon Jovi. And yes, I mean this as a compliment - There was a time when Bon Jovi wrote a hook that made you want to make a movie to go along with it, and in central New Brunswick, Canada they formed as much of the soundtrack as they would in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

People miss the point with the Bruce comparisons It's hard not to listen to Finn's songs and hear Springstein, especially Darkness on the Edge of Town era. Springsteen's heroes were mad losers who were still going to make it, while Finn's heroes are drop outs and dropping faster, but they've got a code, damnit! Also, former keyboardist  Franz Nicolay's fills echo Danny Federici's work with the E Street band, and were quite missed on this tour.

But where the split starts to happen is in the songs. They sound like Springsteen, but Finn's lyrics feature a lot of words. They are crammed full of allusions and metaphors. They swirl around and play with each other. Finn himself loves those words. You can see it in the way he moves around the stage, using his body to give emphasis to his stories, even acting out parts of them. As I watched him that night, I was reminded of another chronicler of outsiders and losers whose love the language wasn't only audible but also reflected in his body language: Elvis Costello.

And that was the line that kept going through my head all night long - The Hold Steady are Elvis Costello and the E Street Band. They combine the best of both acts into something that actually can be a classic rock hipster.

Let this be my annual reminder that we can all be something bigger

Finn on stage is a hypnotic presence. I've mentioned his body language, but he never stops moving. Between lines he moves the microphone away and keeps talking to people in the crowd, or repeating lines. It's another sign that he's a fellow lover of words and what they can be, as we general do not posses the ability to actually stop talking since there's always another word that will fit right in with what we're talking about. He also doesn't look like a rock star: I would gather that he's mostly slim because they're on tour and he burns about 10 lbs a night, but he has thick glasses and his hairline is beating a steady retreat. My friend The New Trendy Area in Toronto compared him to a policy analyst. I think he's a throwback to the late 70s and 80s when rock critics would actually form their own bands.



And the sing along songs will be our scriptures


The show is a passionate one. Finn's motions are not the act of an angry man but someone who loves what he does, loves doing it for you, and just can't help it anymore. There might even be an element of 'I can't believe I get paid to do it!' in there as well. Sometimes the songs tend to run into each other live, a lot of them sounding a bit alike in tone and structure.

But at the same time, many of these are part of a larger narrative that Finn has been telling about his characters and his city (a narrative that is absent on their latest Heaven is Wherever). It's not a big Coheed & Cambria story, but a series of brief vignettes, like William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county. It might not be a stretch that by the time he's done, Finn might be seen as a voice of a region in the same way Faulkner is, just on a different scale.