The Hold Steady are ridiculous. They know what they love and they love it a lot. Feel good, old school American rock with a healthy splat of what use to be called heavy metal – Guns ‘n’ Roses, Motley Crue etc - but isn’t actually anything of the sort, is their tipple.
I would suggest that they also love, with undiluted homage, Bruce Springsteen. This then, was a very American sounding affair, so the venue – Hoxton Bar & Grill – was a suitably across-the-Atlantic-influenced hovel. The residents of which were a mixture of the middle aged and the long haired. Like I said - ridiculous. I felt like I was in a time warp.
Anyway, the scene is set, onto the music…
Keyboard backed, Les Paul rock riffs and elaborate solo’s were the main ingredient, covered often by Craig Finn’s highly distinctive and easily detestable speak/sing drawl. It’s big, it sounds dumb but it definitely isn’t, and Finn is without doubt one of the strangest front men I’ve ever witnessed.
Not a young man, naturally, but owning the traits of a weird child constantly and incessantly demanding attention. No doubt most performers crave this somewhat, but I’ve never seen it quite this blatant. It does somehow make him fairly likeable though, in a ‘bloody hell, he is enjoying himself’ type of way. You wouldn’t want to be his friend though. This band are quite probably a vehicle from which he can tell us about himself, which he does a lot, but crucially, he does it superbly.
They have crowd-pleasers galore. Their new record is a fun-time romp including Chips Ahoy and Southtown Girls which’re genuine anthems. These guys want big. Their music is massive, their skills are honed and they’re all wrong in a small venue. Their pure, unadulterated brand of power/sport rock is pretty much the antithesis of anything vaguely new wave or progressive, and it could, given half the chance, delight thousands upon thousands of people at a time, no problem. If you like that sort of thing.
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