The Hold Steady - Stay Positive

It’s a pretty safe bet that an album by the Hold Steady will revolve around a few things: alcohol, drugs, sex and God. The formula is as old as rock ’n roll itself, but bandleader Craig Finn has done it better than most by weaving vivid tales of teen and twentysomething debauchery. And despite the new album’s title, Stay Positive is of the same mold.

People like to call the Hold Steady “bar rock,” whatever that means. Bar rock or not, the band excels at using classic rock archetypes and yes, Springsteen, to forge fist-pumping anthems soaked with beer and distortion. Since 2005’s Separation Sunday and the band’s breakthrough Boys and Girls in America in ’06, Franz Nicolay’s keyboard work has also become integral to the sound.

Boys and Girls captured the band in a more streamlined state, and Stay Positive takes that further with even more emphasis on production and some additional elements. You’ll notice a harpsichord on “One for the Cutters,” a talk-box solo on “Joke About Jamaica,” synth on “Navy Sheets,” etc. There’s even some guest vocals from the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood and Lucero’s Ben Nichols.

But the Hold Steady is a reflection of Finn first and foremost, his craggy voice talk-singing with almost audible spittle. In “One for the Cutters,” Finn tells the story of a girl who liked to party with townies when the regular crowd wasn’t around. They seemed pretty similar to her other friends, at least up until the night of the stabbing.

“Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered in Memphis” are classic Hold Steady rousers, while “Lord I’m Discouraged” is the album’s stand-out ballad--a piano-driven tune with a narrator who’s justifiably concerned about the “excuses and half truths and fortified wine” coming from a woman who won’t ever be his. “The sutures and bruises are none of my business,” he says, but “this guy from the north side comes down to visit. His visits they only take five or six minutes.”

The album as a whole sends decidedly mixed messages, though. “We gotta stay positive,” Finn says on the title track, and that glass-half-full mentality stems from the leadoff track’s assertion that “We are our only saviors.” Yet on the very next song, and for most of the rest of the album, we see story after story--told in squirmy, veracious detail--about humanity’s pitfalls. We have slave-like addictions to all the likely suspects. We sacrifice pieces of ourselves while trying unsuccessfully to fit in. We take advantage of other people. Sometimes we even kill each other. And we are our saviors? That’s supposed to make us stay positive?

Finn himself admits the glaring inconsistency in that title track again: “It’s one thing to start it with a positive jam, and it’s another thing to see it on through.”

A discrepant philosophy, though, is just another aspect of the human struggle, and embodying that plight is what the Hold Steady does best. After all, it wouldn’t be a Hold Steady album if Finn actually saw all that positivity through to the end. It’s his heartbreaking grasp of depravity that keeps us coming back.

mp3: The Hold Steady - One for the Cutters