The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn crafts lyrics packed with intense imagery and visual vignettes that send you to the credits searching for the location scout and production designer alongside the rest of the band. Finn can certainly paint a picture and creates 10 more edgily enticing scenarios here (11 if you bag the bonus track on the digital version).
His vocal delivery is as idiosyncratic as ever, singing that’s almost just talking, droning and almost drunkenly drawling, almost snarling, daring us to question his bald, middle-aged right to be quite so cool. Then he gets all dreamy and romantic and inspired and suddenly we’re with him every step of the almost discordant way. You can see him scribbling his lyrics on the back of a napkin in a dive bar from a Nick Tosches or Dan Fante novel – there he is, over there, scrawling away, chaotically surrounded by his cast of characters, the dependents and independents, somehow blessed, almost sacred, eager to move on to a sweeter part of the city. It almost always kills me.
The numbers on this, the Brooklyn outfit’s eighth studio album, are heavy on the usual precise details and in-depth characterisation but offer less of the instantly memorable moments – still authentic, less anthemic. What was it somebody said about poetry being the maximum amount of meaning in the minimum amount of words? Yeah, it’s like that, even if the words are sometimes to the max while the meaning remains elusive.
The playing, arranging and production are expert, the music resolutely reassures and convinces as indie alt-rock that still can remember its post-punk roots while communing with more subtle, “grown-up” grooves. But it’s the storytelling that grabs you, the conspiratorial set-ups, close and personal, loaded with specifics, that can open out to reveal a bigger picture (where’s that camera operator, where’s the key grip?!).
Unpleasant Breakfast builds from a sparse opening to a haunting, complex tale of the “girl in last year’s picture”, while Hanover Camera is hypnotic and illicit (“The party with the python in the shower/ Heather with the henna on her hands” … “I swear I saw soldiers selling single cigarettes/ Stationed about halfway up the stairs” – again, conspiratorial).
Family Farm, among its manic drums and raucous horns, includes the magnificent microcosm of “the nurse that they assigned me had (Van Halen’s) Eruption as her ringtone”, while Finn also knows when to aim for the macrocosm (from Spices – “She makes it really clear that she’s a way different person/ Than the person that I knew in the past/ But once she starts rolling it’s wild like the ocean/ And the ocean is violent and vast.”)
Does any of it echo the intimate yet epic dramas of Positive Jam, The Swish and Killer Parties, or Yeah Sapphire and Hurricane J(essie)? Almost. The aforementioned Hanover Camera and the supple and versatile Me & Magdalena (not The Monkees one) perhaps come closest. But Open Door Policy still feels as if it has evolved out of some of the great, great moments of the band’s past and surely deserves to endure due to its very own deep strengths.
Open Door Policy by The Hold Steady is out now on Positive Jams/Thirty Tigers.