Categories : Featured Review, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 4.5/5 Released: October 3, 2006 Reviewer: Nathan Atnikov |
If every great song were traced back to inception, you’d find something that existed before the lead riff, the hook, or even the first trace of music and lyrics. The first ingredient in every great song is an idea – and nobody in rock music today has better ideas than The Hold Steady.
On Boys and Girls in America, Craig Finn and co. continue many of the themes from last year’s classic Separation Sunday. Finn brilliantly blurs the lines between love and lust, fun and danger, and drugs and religious epiphanies, all the while employing his nasally drawl to suggest that he’s had his share of experiences to back up the stark visuals in his lyrics. But it’s the plots of the songs that often take centre stage; plots big enough to fill novels tucked into four-minute slices of life. ‘Chips Ahoy!’ tells the story of a drug addict with a knack for picking the winning horse at the track, while ‘Massive Nights’ follows a group of friends at a school dance “all powered up on some upper drug.†Yes, drugs are once again front and centre in Finn’s story-telling.
But it isn’t Finn’s stories or his apparent first-hand knowledge of drug culture that makes Boys and Girls so profound – it’s this 34-year-old man’s ability to so vividly dissect what it’s like to be, well, boys and girls in America.
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