Despite the fact that they are “from” Brooklyn, which is obviously where all successful indie rock bands stake their claim—to me, The Hold Steady are a Minnesota band. Maybe that has to do with the fact that frontman Craig Finn spent time in Minneapolis, where he formed the much loved, long defunct Lifter Puller. Maybe it’s because the “hip” radio station out of the Twin Cities, 89.3 The Current, still reps The Hold Steady incredibly hard. Or maybe it’s because of these two anecdotes:
1- I moved to Minnesota in May of 2006, months before The Hold Steady’s breakthrough record, Boys and Girls in America was released. It took me quite awhile to become comfortable with driving around on the highways, and navigating both the big, scary city, as well as the sprawling suburbs that surround it. In August of that year, I recall a moment where I heard The Hold Steady song, “Southtown Girls,” on the radio (89.3 The Current, of course) in a car that I was the passenger in. I think either my wife’s sister, or her sister’s husband were driving us around, and I had no idea where we were going—we ended up at a Cheesecake Factory, in Edina. Hearing that song on the radio though, it always stuck with me. This certainly wasn’t an important moment in my life. And why would it be? Going to The Cheesecake Factory should never be an important or memorable experience in anyone’s life. But this short vignette of hearing Craig Finn speak/sing about how Southtown girls won’t blow you away, while I was sitting in the back seat of what was probably a BMW, speeding down 494—I’m unable to shake it.
2- Some time in 2007, sitting in the shitty Italian restaurant in the Mall of America—the one that is right across from Urban Outfitters, I am mistaken for Craig Finn. My wife and I, along with our friend Carrie, are eating dinner, when I notice a nervous young woman approaching our table. “Excuse me,” she says. “Are you the guy from The Hold Steady?” Our friend Carrie is incredibly confused, my wife stifles a laugh, and I laugh heartily, saying, “No, no I’m not.” This young woman, obviously just a huge fan of The Hold Steady, thinks that I am Craig Finn, simply because I have a beard, black plastic frame glasses, am wearing a Yo La Tengo t-shirt, and am enjoying a mediocre at best Italian dinner in a suburb of the Twin Cities. Later, my wife and laugh that this girl didn’t even know Craig Finn’s name—he’s just “the guy” from The Hold Steady.
In the year of our #based god, 2014, it’s nearly unfathomable for me to believe that people give a shit about The Hold Steady—but here we are. The band has returned after a four-year hiatus with their sixth full-length effort, Teeth Dreams; and if that were not enough, the band has also released a covers EP, Rags, because why not?
I gave a shit about The Hold Steady for about a total of two years. After my transformative experience listening to “Southtown Girls” in the back of a speeding BMW on a hot August evening, I went out and plunked down my hard earned money at the record store (now closed) and picked up Boys and Girls in America. To say that the band—specifically Finn’s post-Springsteen, incredibly earnest shouting/talking/singing delivery of his lyrics—is an acquired taste, well, that’s an understatement. Boys and Girls, for all of its big public radio singles and critical lauding definitely was not something I was ever 100% committed to, and I realized just how disinterested I was in the band by the time their fourth LP was released in 2008. Because you know, it was just more of the same.
To sum up Teeth Dreams in one word—I would use “awful.” Or possibly “unlistenable.” Trying to tolerate this record to write this review has been a chore to end all chores. It is, without a doubt, one of the worst records I will hear in 2014, and in analyzing it, I’ve come to the conclusion that The Hold Steady make the penultimate kind of #cooldad rock.
Like, this is for cool dads that are maybe too young to really fuck with Wilco, and maybe they like to drink PBR on the weekends or whatever, but they still gotta drive their kids to school in their Volvo station wagons that have an “I Support Public Radio” sticker on the back window.
This is rock music for people that don’t really like rock music.
For a record being released in 2014, Teeth Dreams sounds incredibly dated—like it belongs in the mid-1990s. Many of the songs have such “big” openings, and rely on huge “rock” power chords played with a little bit of crunch, they seem like they would be a perfect fit to be used during the title sequence of a bad 90s comedy—one probably starring Pauly Shore, if possible. There were moments when I realized that The Hold Steady remind me a little bit of the Bob Mould fronted power pop group Sugar when they played at their hardest—but you know, Sugar was good and all, and their lyrics actually meant something.
And let’s talk about those lyrics for a second, huh?
I don’t want to say that “the guy from The Hold Steady” writes songs that are completely devoid of meaning. But they just are meaningless to me. They may mean something to you. I mean, the way he rhymes “scientist” with “experiments” in “Big Cig”—that may be, like, super profound for you as a person. Basically, Craig Finn is like the guy that they can’t cut off from an open mic poetry night at a coffee shop. His ridiculously earnest, partially sung, mostly yelled or dramatically “spoken” delivery may have been novel in 2006, or even before that, but now, it wears out its welcome before the first song on this record has even finished.
Musically, spread across the ten songs on Teeth Dreams, the band shows little diversity. Still posturing with that post-E-Street band pomp and bombast, seven of these songs sound like they are the exact same song. Like I am not even joking. There is such similarity between “Spinners,” and “Wait a While,” that by the time you get into the second half, and “Wait a While” begins, your first thought is, “Hey, didn’t I already listen to this song?”
Later on, on “Runner’s High,” it’s about as generic sounding as the bumper music that plays when a radio broadcast of a Minnesota Twins baseball game comes back from commercial.
When the band decides to get creative with their sound, and change things up slightly, it isn’t exactly a good thing. Teeth Dreams hits the halfway mark with a very dramatic song—“The Ambassador.” Lyrically, it paints a portrait of a very damaged female protagonist, harkening back somewhat to Finn’s earlier story-based songwriting from a decade ago, with characters like Charlemagne and Holly.
Teeth Dreams closes up with two songs that feel incredibly out of place with the rest of this bunch—the acoustic, slow jam “Almost Everything”—the wash of Chorus pedals on the guitars give it an even more dated sound—imagine how the guitar on Prince’s “Sometimes it Snows in April” sounds and you’ll get the idea. It’s another very dramatic, serious song—with lyrics like “There are nights I get terrified. I’m sure you get terrified too.” And actually, that concept—being scared, terrified, whatever, appears more than once on this record—with the opening track aptly being titled “I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You.”
But what are The Hold Steady so afraid of?
The final track, “Oaks,” clocks in at nearly nine minutes. From the very first note, it sounds very reminiscent of the slow-core, downer rock of Codeine. Except, again, those guys were good. The only purpose I can tell that this song serves is to close things up as theatrically as possible—it trudges along at a snail’s pace, but it ends the record with such a “big” rock sound, as if the band is meaning to say, “we’ve got a nine-minute closing track, please take us seriously.”
I would like to pause for just a moment, however, and discuss the EP Rags—which is not so much a companion piece to this album, as it is a collection of five (seemingly random) covers, one picked out by each member of the band. As are most things these days, Rags was bankrolled by the polarizing method of crowd funding. If you pledge money, you were automatically enrolled in The Hold Steady fan club (wait, those are still a thing?) and a portion of the money raised went to pressing these five covers to wax—since vinyl is, after all, the preferred method of music consumption by the kind of people who would give their money to The Hold Steady.
Another portion of the proceeds generated went to a legit good cause—a longtime friend and fan of the band passed away in the fall of 2012, leaving behind two young kids, so some of this money ended up going to the K + L Guardian Foundation, which is apparently helping these two kids out.
For a while, The Hold Steady were dubbed “The Best Bar Band in America,” a title they were given by taste-makers like Rolling Stone and NPR. I hesitate to knock the guys on a charity EP, but Rags just cements the “bar band” status—incredibly uninspired, shitty covers. I think in most cases, you want a band to tackle a cover from a creative place—putting their own spin on it, or at least adding to it. Here—well this is the kind of sloppy rock music you could stumble into any dive bar in any city on any night and hear.
Now back to the new LP. An awkward album title with incredibly tepid cover art, the expression “teeth dreams,” implies having a bad dream about ones teeth—and one could look to this for an answer to the question of what is the band—or specifically just Craig Finn-afraid of.
If you dream of your teeth, it could mean a few things: one of which is that you have anxiety about your appearance, and how others perceive you; another, very similar, theory is that teeth dreams are based out of a fear you have of making a fool of yourself.
Vice’s music site, Noisey, recently ran a piece on “The New Solipsism,” also subtitled “What The Fuck Happened to Indie Rock?” It’s a bit of a joke opinion piece, but the opening line is,”I blame The Hold Steady.” The whole thing basically condemns a few bands by name for making indie rock boring and self-aware.
The Hold Steady represent one of the “big” acts still out there that have felt the slow backlash from the site that honestly helped their career the most—Pitchfork. The band’s last effort, Heaven is Whenever, got a 6.2 out of 10, which is a far cry from the 8’s that they used to rack up, or the unprecedented 9.4 that Boys and Girls in America received. The same thing could be said for other indie rock bands that rose to more mainstream prominence at roughly the same time and pacing—TV on The Radio, for example.
It seems that The Hold Steady are continuing to be incredibly self-aware with the alluded to fear on Teeth Dreams. Maybe they’re afraid of what critics think, or if their fan base has all but moved on now, four years after their last album, and a decade since their debut. Or maybe I’m just reading way too much into this, and it’s just an unfortunate album title, some loosely connected abstract lyrics, and a strange coincidence.
2014, so far, has been the year of boring dad rock—Real Estate, The War on Drugs, Beck, and now this. Teeth Dreams is a maddeningly frustrating record simply because there is nothing to connect with on it. Within seconds of starting it, I wanted to shut it off and run screaming from the room. It’s vapid, stagnant, and stale “rock” music, bringing absolutely no new ideas to the table.
Rating: 0/5
For more from Kevin please visit Anhedonic Headphones.