Hey kids. Do you wanna go dancing in the moonlight? This Brooklyn-based, Minneapolis-reared quartet, currently the most raved about band in America, are no spring chickens and my goodness, doesn’t it show. A delightful gallimaufry of Ashbury Park Springsteen, Replacements riffs, AC/DC headbanging and Thin Lizzy pub rock, there’s something gorgeously old fashioned and roof-raising about The Hold Steady.
Admittedly, it’s decidedly odd that an outfit who describe themselves as America’s number 1 bar band have become such critical darlings, but The Hold Steady are so deceptively brilliant you may not always catch them on the first bounce. The phenomenal buzz (First Band To Grace The Cover Of The Village Voice In 15 Years! etc, etc) has been escalating since the release of their debut album The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me in 2004. Here we were informally introduced to Charlemagne, Gideon, and Holly, the trio of desperate losers who inhabit frontman Craig Finn’s psyche.
Boys And Girls In America brings us up to date with this triumvirate of screw-ups using an incomparable line in gutter poetry. As the songs rollick and roll along, we hear of their disappointments (“She was a damn good dancer/But she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend,”) and their refuges from reality (“I got really high and then I came to in the chill-out tent/They gave me oranges and cigarettes.”). There are oh-so-clever literary precedents beneath the impossibly catchy tunes and the wasted social commentary – the title is drawn from Kerouac’s On The Road and the raucous opener ‘Stuck Between Stations’ references the suicide of John Berryman – but Finn is rarely arch just for the sake of it. Indeed, if your heart doesn’t break into smithereens when you hear ‘You Can Make Him Like You’, then we suggest you call an exorcist.