Candy’s Room
Bruce Springsteen
Darkness on the Edge of Town
The Party Pit
The Hold Steady
Boys and Girls in America
A lot of people claim they don’t much care for Craig Finn’s voice. At worst, I suppose you could say he sounds like Randy Newman if Randy Newman had just had his nose broken in an ugly bar fight and was forced to sing in the direct aftermath. Maybe that’s not a perfect analogy (maybe), but one thing Finn has in common with Newman is that they both like to sing in great detail about things going on around them, and they both like to tell stories with heavy, almost overbearing, doses of fond nostalgia. Case in point: the opening salvo on the Hold Steady’s third album invokes the name of every semi-literate high school rebel’s patron saint, Sal Paradise. Heck, even the guitar riffs sound nostalgiac for a time when Led Zeppelin meant something more than just Cadillac commericials. The entire mission of the band the Hold Steady, it seems, is to redeem the foggy memory of every drunken and ill-fated romance, every desperate and youthful drug run, and every down-and-out suburban tramp who’s ever had a heart. In the hands of less graceful storytellers, the exploits of Finn’s characters could be glamorized or pitied, but Finn is more magnanimous than even that. In Separation Sunday, the follies of his principle players were elevated to pseudo-spiritual revelations, but Boys and Girls in America sees Finn taking a bigger risk by trumping his hoodrat dramas without blowing out his metaphors.
I’m also told that Springsteen is a good reference point.
-Posted by Todd
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