The Hold Steady - Separation Sunday

The first few listens, Separation Sunday sounds like something you’ve heard a zillion times before. Fuzzy guitars crunching out power chords and blistering solos, along with organs, horns and backing vocals. A boozy, sleazy bar-band sound that arose with Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, had its 1970s golden age with Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy, J. Geils, AC-DC and the E Street Band, only to dead-end about 20 years ago with the Georgia Satellites, Southside Johnny and (shudder) John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. A sound that low-fi 1990s revivalists like Guided by Voices mostly avoided.

Yes, at the first few listens, The Hold Steady sound hackneyed. Yet the melodies are undeniably catchy and propulsive. And the band’s playing is extremely tight. Plus, none of the songs sound like tossed-off filler. In fact, the album is so uniformly decent that it’s even hard to pick out a standout track (though “Your Little Hoodrat Friend,” “Stevie Nix” and “Multitude of Casualties” would be my picks).

And lead singer (and songwriter) Craig Finn sure sounds passionate, even if he’s talking – reading, really – more than he’s singing. And even though he sounds like a cross between Bruce Springsteen and Barney Gumble from The Simpsons.

But more than that, Finn’s lyrics are outstanding. He reads/sings them fast and slurred, so at first you don’t pick up more than intriguing snippets. “Oh, to be 17 forever.” “Charlemagne’s got something in his sweatpants.” “I guess the heavy stuff ain’t quite at its heaviest by the time it gets out to suburban Minneapolis.”

Focus on the words, though, and it turns out that Separation Sunday is practically a concept album. Though not quite in chronological order, it appears to tell the story of a messed-up girl named Hallelujah (or Holly) who parties too much, gets mixed up in drugs, works for a pimp named Charlemagne, ends up in Minneapolis with even more drugs, scrounges for food and goes to the movies, bottoms out, finds religion, and much else.

Finn’s scenes of depravity and redemption are peppered with black humor (“She said you remind me of Rod Stewart when he was young. You've got passion, you think that you're sexy. And all the punks think that you're dumb.”), biblical references (“I guess I heard about original sin. I heard the dude blamed the chick. I heard the chick blamed the snake. I heard they were naked when they got busted. I heard things ain’t been the same since.”), literary references (“He told him what to celebrate. And I met William Butler Yeats. Sunday nite dance party summer 1988. At first I thought it might be William Blake.”), historical references (“We didn’t go to Dallas. 'Cause Jackie Onassis said that it ain’t safe for Catholics yet. Think about what they pulled on Kennedy.”), and character sketches (“Her parents named her Halleluiah, the kids all called her Holly. If she scared you then she’s sorry. She’s been stranded at these parties.”).

Lyrics like these, of course, sound a bit precious when Belle and Sebastian, Elliott Smith or Bright Eyes intone them over gentle acoustic guitars or orchestration. The effect is totally different, though, when they are sung/spoken to the accompaniment of the driving guitars, wailing organ and pounding drums usually associated with middlebrow, muscle-car-driving, pool-playing, cheap-beer-drinking arena rock. An odd combination, but it mostly works. And it’s not at all hackneyed.