The Holdsteady @ The Borderline

at The Borderline Review

0/5
Venue: The Borderline
Gig: The Holdsteady @ The Borderline
Gig date: 18th February 2007
Posted on 22nd June 2007 by bennyboy

"There is so so much joy in what we do here," gasps a sweaty Craig Finn, beaming, as the crowd swamps the stage. "And you guys and us guys, we're all The Hold Steady." So if you've been trying to explain the collective Y-Front twisting over this Minneapolis-via-Brooklyn quintet, well, look no further for your answer. Call their rise the revenge of that most durable citizen of rock - the Fifty Quid Bloke. And Music Critic Bloke, the version with an English degree. For every 40 something frowning his way down Tottenham Court Road past kids queuing for an Astoria headliner he's never heard of, The Hold Steady feel like a world where everything makes (rock'n'roll) sense. And at some points tonight - when the well-worn sounds are muscular and full of passion, and Finn's incantatory words summon street corner heroes and zeroes straight out of Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland" - it's an appealing destination. Still, you know what kind of world we're talking about. This is the Borderline, after all. It's the plaid-shirt, retreating-hairline world of Uncut and Word and top ten lists on Mark Radcliffe. It's "Born To Run" on vinyl. It's those dog-eared paperbacks by Jack Kerouac (whose Sal Paradise roams a gloriously charged-up set-opener "Stuck Between Stations"). It's a world of golden-haired, screwed-up girls ("Party Pit", "You Can Make Him Like You") and songs where Finn confides, in a throwaway comment that could sum up an entire genre, "It's not really about the girl at all, it's about the guy" ("Chips Ahoy"). It's all the substances Fifty Quid Bloke ingested in his younger days - and, judging from the Mississippi of drugs and booze running through "Soft Hot Light", "Massive Nights" and ad-libbed encore "First Night", are still being enjoyed in Finn's later ones. It's a world of euphoric E-Street piano runs and rollicking organ fills, and AC/DC-meets-pub-rock guitars as whoo-hoo fists fill the air. And it's a world ruled, for tonight, by the bespectacled Finn, who looks like a character in "Sideways", sounds like a suburban Randy Newman and spins tales like Greg Dulli without the tar-black sex appeal. He's simultaneously the core of the band's appeal and the reason you'd be hard pressed to imagine a Next Big Thing who could be any more un-hip. (Albeit not un-Hip, since every Canadian in the house spots the band's substantial debt to the Tragically Hip). This evening's focus is their new album, called "Boys And Girls In America". And for the handful of magic they strew across a well-trodden landscape, you can almost forgive The Hold Steady for not being honest enough to call it "Nostalgic Men Everywhere". by Jennifer Nine

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