Teeth Dreams
After a four-year hiatus, The Hold Steady returned in 2014 with *Teeth Dreams*, the group’s sixth studio album. In between releases, the group recorded a version of “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” for HBO’s *Game of Thrones*—series co-creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were devoted Hold Steady fans—while lead singer Craig Finn released his debut solo record, 2012’s *Clear Heart Full Eyes*. Meanwhile, guitarist Steve Selvidge—who’d toured with the band for *Heaven Is Whenever*—had joined as a full-time member. You can hear his contributions throughout *Teeth Dreams*, which finds Selvidge and founding member Tad Kubler slamming out dueling guitars as Finn howls and sings his spirited, blue-collar tales of rough living and even rougher redemption. The first lyrics on the album—referring to Finn’s fictional Twin Cities gang—could double as a mission statement: “I heard the Cityscape Skins are kinda kicking it again.” With *Teeth Dreams*, The Hold Steady created a big, rollicking album that focuses on both heartbreak and hopeful longing. The band’s mature confidence is on full display in songs like “I Hope This Whole Thing Didn\'t Frighten You,” “Spinners,” “The Only Thing,” and \"Big Cig.” But it’s the album’s closing track—the soulful, nine-minute ballad “Oaks”—that steals the show, quenching the thirst of any Hold Steady fan who\'d missed the band’s music for almost half a decade.
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.