E-Streeter checks out the ELM favourites;
Quite simply, it is a crime against the Gods of Music that a band as good as The Hold Steady are playing a theatrical armpit like the Oxford ‘Carling’ (translation: plastic beakers and £4 per pint of fizzy dishwater) Academy on a Monday night in December to about 500 people. Even a casual trawl round VH1, MTV or Kerrang! would put an insomniac into a musical coma, yet four albums of exquisitely crafted tunes and one of the best live acts around isn’t enough to put this band into the musical mainstream. It’s criminal, and if this is the New World Order kindly ram it somewhere sans lubricant.
Still, those of us braving the wet and cold of Oxford are blessed, richly rewarded with 23 (!) songs culled from an impressive back catalogue. Summoning all the objectivity I can dredge up, ‘Boys And Girls In America’ is a work of genius and slow-burned it’s way into my heart, beginning a mutual love affair with a band who enjoy playing as much as we do watching and singing along to the contagious hooks and joyfully yobbish ‘woah oh ohs’ that populate a THS set list. ‘Certain songs get scratched into your soul’. Indeed.
If you haven’t seen them live, you really are missing something unique – a band that don’t put a face on and love sharing what they do. Not ‘please love me’, but ‘isn’t this f*cking great?!’ way. Craig Finn, the most unlikely looking front man in music, is a two for the price one singer – singing the same lines or a verbal underscoring off mike and into the faces of the crowd, all done in a sweaty earnest way which avoids cliché with ease, Franz Nikolay’s keyboards swirling around the now recovered Tad Kubler on guitar, whose deceptively casual style drives the band along at an occasionally uncertain, always engaging pace which the Polivka/Drake rhythm section tries to set.
Highlights for me were a left-field ‘Modesto’s Not That Sweet’ (one for THS anoraks), a blistering ‘Constructive Summer’ opener which had the place bouncing from note one and pre-encore closer ‘Slapped Actress’, a jewel from the new ‘Stay Positive’ CD from which 8 other songs got an outing. I’ll be going to see THS in Bristol on Friday night, I know – absolutely know – that it’ll be a top drawer evening spent with people who love what they do and love to share it with you. Tom Perotta of The Guardian recently described The Hold Steady as the ‘fiercest, funniest, druggiest, most visionary American rock band of the 21st century’. Catch them while you can.
Filed under: gigs Tagged: | Craig finn, hold steady oxford, hold steady stay positive, Sequestered in memphis, the Hold Steady, the hold steady live
