Teeth Dreams
Now that The Hold Steady sport three guitarists with the addition of Steve Selvidge, it’s pretty obvious which end of their sound the band are further pursuing. They’d indulged an E Street Band vibe with Franz Nicolay’s flashy keyboards, but with Nicolay’s continued absence, the band now focus on guitarist Tad Kubler’s love for AC/DC and Thin Lizzy. That’s not to say the band have gone for the complete ham-fist; they’re still conceptualists at heart, and “The Ambassadors” has its sound layered with guitar arpeggios, swirling organs, and subtler moves (courtesy, in part, of producer Nick Raskulinecz, who broke the \"crossover\" code for Foo Fighters). Singer/narrator Craig Finn (who may or may not have delegated his guitar duties) still sings of misguided kids in search of understanding, but Finn also sounds like a man who’s hit the wall and is all for instilling notions of restraint in his characters. “Conventional wisdom says we should probably cruise,” he says in “On with the Business.” But with so many guitars pushing him to the edge, it’s more likely that his people are going for broke.
After four good-to-fantastic records, the Hold Steady returned in 2010 with Heaven Is Whenever, a too-sleek, cliche-mottled shrug of a record. From its opening line on, the band's sixth album, Teeth Dreams, tries to position itself as a return to form.
There’s a point about halfway through “Oaks”—the “holy shit, it’s nine minutes long” closing song of The Hold Steady’s sixth album, Teeth Dreams—where everything drops out except for the guitar and vocals. Space opens up. Echoes swirl. Craig Finn sings about “mountains all covered in oaks.” Yes, sings. The frontman…
Craig Finn reconvenes his band for a sixth album of hook-laden pop and bar-honed chops.
You only call yourself The Hold Steady if you think most people aren’t holding steady to start with.
On their last album, 2010's Heaven Is Whenever, the Hold Steady felt like a band in a state of transition as they found their footing after parting ways with Franz Nicolay.
NPR once referred to The Hold Steady as "America's bar band." Insofar as bar bands owe a debt to Thin Lizzy, the description was apt, but beyond that, it did a disservice to Craig Finn's word-drunk lyrics and the band's Springsteen-by-way-of-ZZ-Top thump.
Album review: The Hold Steady - Teeth Dreams. The Craig Finn-fronted New York band's sixth album shows that they can pluck magic from just about anywhere.
<p>The Hold Steady's sixth album sees their sound get bigger and singer Craig Finn's songwriting subtly evolve, writes <strong>Kitty Empire</strong></p>
Brooklyn's blue-collar rock heroes sound like a band recharged, with an immediacy that's disorienting and restless energy, writes <strong>Charlotte Richardson Andrews</strong>
Thinking back, it was with 2010’s Heaven is Whenever that I stopped recommending my favourite band to the people who didn’t already get it. It wasn’t that it was a bad album – in capturing the world-weariness of the party band once the world moves on it was almost exactly the one that they needed to make – but by that stage you probably knew yourself whether you were the type of hopeless barroom romantic likely to learn lessons from the one who’d seen it all in the corner.