The Hold Steady, “Heaven is Whenever”
(Released May 4th, on Vagrant Records, US)
On their fifth album, America’s greatest bar band returns with a set of songs that are characteristically nostalgic, yet tinged with a wistful regret. Led by lead singer/shouter/talker/storyteller Craig Finn, The Hold Steady hail from Brooklyn by way of the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Their songs weave Springsteen-esque tales of dreamers, hustlers, losers, and the women who love them … or stay with them because they can’t do any better. The band’s new album again returns to the clubs and hangouts of the band’s youth. The album opener, “The Sweet Part of the City,” spins a lyrical tale of a group of kids who hung around a Minnesota club, with seemingly nothing to do … until one day they are saved by forming a band. That band’s name? The Hold Steady, and as the last line intones, they’d like to play for you. Elsewhere on the album, the band sings of two young lovers, who realize that, “Heaven is whenever we can get together/Lock your bedroom door and listen to your records.” The album unfolds under an elegiac tone, of a lost time when all that mattered was working for the weekend so that you can hang out somewhere in town with your friends and listen to the music. The production and the playing are slower than on previous albums, reflecting the tone of the songs. This album a bit of a comedown from previous rowdy, rocking party albums such as 2006’s breakthrough “Boys and Girls in America” and 2008’s “Stay Positive.” Think of it as a Sunday morning after a particularly rough Saturday night.
The Hold Steady, “The Weekenders”
The Dead Weather, “Sea of Cowards”
(Released May 7th, on Third Man Records)
The second album released by Jack White’s other other band arrives less than a year after the band’s debut relase, last July’s Horehound, and barely a year after the band sprung into existence int he first place. And that manic, “let’s get this done” attitude permeates this swampy, sweaty basher of an album throughout. Formed last year by Jack White (who returns to his original instrument, the drums) and The Kills frontwoman Alison Mosshart, along with Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stoneage, and Jack Lawrence, whoi plays with White in the Raconteurs, the band returns with this year’s model, Sea of Cowards, which doesn;t deviate much from the template laid down by last year’s debut. The band still sounds like they record in a shack in the swamps of Tennesee in 1927, playing a mixture of blues, garage rock, with a touch of Led Zep thown in. White shares the lead howling with Mosshart, and the two come across as a lovers at each others throats, as they dodge and weave verbally throughout such songs as “Hustle and Cuss” and especially in “The Difference Between Us,” where Mosshart pleads for some time to figure it all out. The two do get to shine solo, as well, as the album open with “Blue Blood Blues,” a crunching, spnning top of a song, in which Jack swaggers into town, making all the neighbors “nervous,” and further confusing the towfolk by repenting on Sunday, noting that “the white girls trip when I sing at Sunday service.” Not to be outdone, Mosshart shines on the sinister “Die by the Drop,” as a woman who will take her problems (and anyone who gets involved with these problems) to the grave. The grim, Gothic tales of these songs are ensconced in bluesy, jagged rock, making for another leather-jacketed gang of an album – not to be messed with, and not to be missed.
The Dead Weather, “Die by the Drop”
The National, “High Violet”
(Released May 11th, on 4AD)
Finally, Brooklyn’s finest return, in fine, sad form, with High Violet. The band, from Brooklyn by way of Cincinnati, Ohio, have been slowly smoldering in popularity over the past 5 years, with their gorgeously constructed songs that perfectly caprute the impending worries and small victories of growing up and growing older. Not exactly the tunes that you are goiong to blast at this summer’s cookouts. Led by singer Matt Berninger’s deep baritone, the band explored early twenties post college life in 2005’s Alligator, and then focused on growing up, getting married, having kids, yet still clinging to youthful ambitions in 2007’s Boxer. With High Violet, the band casts its detail-orientated eye solidly on the late-30s lament “Is this it?” Lead song “Terrible Love” finds Berninger figuratively walking with love gone wrong, then chased in the second song by “Sorrow,” which Berninger notes, “found me when I was young.” Images of ghosts and being haunted by lost youth permeate the album, perhaps none more so than in the aptly titled “Anyone’s Ghost.” Memories of childhood homes left behind are wistfully recalled in the lead single “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” as the band ruefully admits that “Ohio don’t remember me.” This would all sound completely off-putting if not for accompaniedby the intertwined, interplaying guitar lines, the skipping drums, and the overall warm, at times orchestral production. No other band today makes the small struggles of getting by in modern life sound epic.
