Hold Steady Hit The Road
Anyone going to Hold Steady's free show at Castle Clinton tonight? You'll presumably hear cuts from the band's third album Boys and Girls in America (10/3). And I'm jealous of you. (I have to wait 'til Lollapalooza.)
Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield tells us what to expect with Boys and Girls:
Damn you, Hold Steady! How can any band be this good?You had me at Journey, Rob....
If there's an instant anthem a la "Your Little Hoodrat Friend," "Barfruit Blues," or "Killer Parties," it’s "Chillout Tent," a sequel to Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’," with two young lovers meeting at the rock festival’s medical emergency area after too many mushrooms. Definitely a punk rock romance for our time, and a song only the Hold Steady could write.
I know some of you have the album. Fill us in.
Posted at 12:39 PM
Tags: The Hold Steady
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Does anyone know if it's acoustic or not tonight? If one band shouldn't EVER play acoustic, it's The Hold Steady.
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Yeah, I just don't hear it.
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Rob Sheffield gives Blink 182 albums four stars, so I totally trust his desperately hip and freak-headed opinion.
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It's not acoustic. It's stripped down. It's definitely different for them, and you will probably wish it was electric, but I think some songs sound cool and early springsteenish this way.
check out what I mean on this blog. I think Stuck Between Stations is awesome stripped down. Cattle And The Creeping Things is weird.
http://www.bowsplusarrows.com/2005/12/new-songs-hold-steady-attn-everyone.html
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To be fair, Blink 182's put out some very good records. You might not be a fan of the genre, but the records are good none the less.
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WTF is an album preview? Is this like video game reviews where I get all hyped for some game with slick graphics and a "revolutionary" game play mechanic only to find the same old shit getting a 2 star review from the same magazine come release day?
Not that a Hold Steady album could suck, but Rolling Stone, give up the ghost.
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Rob Sheffield looks like a burn victim.
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Why does everything sound like Bruce Springsteen these days? Of course, The Hold Steady's new album is way better than anything The Killers could ever do, but you all knew that.
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So I saw them...yeah, the Hold Steady should not play acoustic. But more importantly, I'm a little worried about the new album. It is of course hard to tell how these songs will turn out on record, but the songwriting definitely seems much weaker, in that the songs are more repetitive and lack a great deal of the wit and humor of the Hold Steady's best work. They didn't seem bad per se, just uninspired - weaker, staler lyrics and confined narratives. (The song Sheffield mentions, "Chillout Tent," is sort of a boring story with little more than what he paraphrases, surprisingly, as if there's one thing Craig Finn isn't, it's boring.) The sound was pretty good and I was attentive, and I didn't hear anything really quotable. Again, not bad, but I think they have been a little Vagrant-ized. On the bright side, though, Craig Finn is hilarious - today he was all about the Twins (who, for those of you who aren't baseball fans, are just tearing up the American League, although we'll see what happens). The Twins just swept the White Sox, so, of course, that was how he introduced "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night," and during the bridge to "Your Little Hoodrat Friend," he mentioned that it was his mother's birthday and that she was here, and talked about the difficulty of finding a Hold Steady song that he can introduce his mom before. So we'll see - hopefully the new album is better than it sounded tonight.
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The album is great! The only one I've really taken a liking to from them-very anthematic as everyone else seems to be saying and I heart the horse racing song
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