Stay Positive

I started thinking about the first half of the previous post on repetitive listening because I heard an album so good that I've listened to it all the way through ten times since I got it just a few weeks ago. The album, Stay Positive, by the Hold Steady, comes out the second week of July, but leaked in early June and is already available on the iTunes store (Remember to buy all of it! Not just one song!). The Hold Steady shot up into my top ten list of bands as soon as I heard them a few months ago, starting with their album Separation Sunday. When The Hydrogen Jukebox offered me the new album, I leapt on the chance. It was late at night when the file transfer finished, so I listened the next day in a state of shock. It was undoubtedly the best Hold Steady yet.

The Hold Steady have always been a riff based band, and they have done it well. The riffs on Stay Positive, whether played on guitar, organ, or even harpsichord, are some of the most memorable riffs since Amon Amarth's album The Fate Of Norns. (Did I really just compare The Hold Steady to Viking themed Melo-Death? I guess I did.) Some of my favorite riffs come from the opener, Constructive Summer, the ultra-catchy organ part in Navy Sheets, the intro riff from Yeah Sapphire, though every song on the album has at least one riff that sticks in your head and blows your mind.

Lyrically, The Hold Steady are at the top of their game. While I found the stories on previous albums to be somewhat loose and general, Stay Positive tells a specific story and it tells it well. As far as I've been able to tell, Holly and Charlemagne, characters from past albums, have returned, though they're not mentioned by name, instead by indirect references, such as the reuse of the line "and there's gonna come a time when she's gonna have to go with whoever's gonna get her the highest" from the opening moments of Separation Sunday, though instead of the first person used on that album, this time the words appear in third person, as though there is another observer. I have not yet been able to figure out whether the narrator is Charlemagne or if he is just another character referred to in the story, though I think he is. The plot opens with a declaration that "we're gonna build something this summer," setting the stage for a group of college students with nothing to do, hanging around and getting into trouble. From there the scene shifts to a deposition, Charlemagne - or a different male character - is being "interviewed" about what happened with him and a girl, where they were, what they did, what sort of car she drove. We then find out that a girl, Holly, has given a murderer a ride, without quite knowing if he did anything. Over the course of the rest of the album, Charlemagne struggles with his relationship with this girl who seems to be uninterested in him. 

In keeping with the Catholicism of The Hold Steady, each character has a crisis of faith, Charlemagne's come on the track "Lord, I'm Discouraged," a plea for God's help with his failing relationship: "Lord, I'm discouraged/she ain't come out dancing for some time." The girl's crisis follows two tracks later, on "Both Crosses," an incredible song, with some of the best symbolism I've heard in music. The plot element of the song is the girl seeing video of the killing, and finally realizing that yes, the boy she gave a ride to was the one who committed the murder. Meanwhile, in her head, all she can see is "visions" of the crucifixion, flashing back and forth with visions of the murder: 

And she saw all the footage right before it got cut

and she saw all the bodies and she saw the blood

she saw the angel put a sword in his side

and baby that's how we got canonized

and she saw him gushing blood right before it got cut

and she saw him put a body in a bag in the trunk

and she saw the guys coming in from the sides

and baby that's how we get energized

The song is unquestionably my favorite on the album, I've even joked that "It's almost good enough to turn me Catholic." 

Stay Positive cements The Hold Steady's position in my mind as one of the best rock bands making music at this time. Stay Positive gathers everything good about the previous two records, weeds out some of the more annoying bits such as the shouted vocals on Separation Sunday, and packages it all together in 43 glorious minutes.