The Hold Steady - Teeth Dreams
On 2010's Heaven is Whenever, The Hold Steady sounded like a band without a plan. Their first album following the departure of iconic keyboardist/vocalist/raconteur Franz Nicolay, Heaven found the Brooklyn-via-Minnesota band trying on disparate sounds, from the languid sway of "Sweet Part of the City" to the vaguely Eastern European bounce of "Barely Breathing," seeing just what might stick as the Hold Steady moved forward. Amid the slide guitar flourishes and clarinet solos, a more likely direction was presented by singles "Hurricane J" and "The Weekenders" - punchy, radio-ready rockers that showed the band was content to jettison both the classic rock trappings and lit-nerd weirdness that marked earlier records and commit to a full-time move to the modern end of the dial.
The press materials preceding the release of Teeth Dreams made clear that Hold Steady 2.0 indeed chose the latter path, emphasizing the addition of former Lucero touring guitarist Steve Selvidge as an official member and the choice to work with modern-rock producer Nick Raskulinecz (Deftones, Stone Sour, Alice in Chains). Selvidge, at least, seems to pay immediate dividends, allowing lead guitarist Tad Kubler to fully embrace the kinds of Thin Lizzy riffs and low-slung solos that the band used to offer with a wink, a smirk, and a harpsichord flourish. Coupled with singer Craig Finn's continued move away from his old college-professor-on-a-bender delivery in favor of full-on singing, the new commitment to capital-r Rock delivers its share of highs. Lead single "Spinners" seems destined for movie trailers - bright, smart, fun, and delivered with the right balance of literary detail and universal sentiment. "The Ambassador" improves on the slowed-down aesthetic of Heaven's pseudo-title track "We Can Get Together" and contains both Finn's best vocal performance and the best nod to the cast of Twin Cities characters that populated the band's first three records, with a sly "I'm pretty sure you'd recognize these guys" and a heartfelt "You came back to us/south Minneapolis." Elsewhere, the new lineup also proves it can still deliver old-guard Steady-isms with the rollicking "Big Cig," another in a long line of Finn's character studies of screwed-up women and the losers they sometimes deign to sleep with.
Lyrically, Finn has stopped trying to be the cleverest guy in the room, more content to tell stories in song that don't always read as well on the page. He's far less quotable, but also far less likely to pull the non-initiated out of the moment with obscure references to his own mythology. He also seems less willing to romanticize "all that druggie stuff" than before; while Hold Steady songs have always toed the line between glorifying seedy lifestyles and acknowledging their transience, most of the people presented in Teeth Dreams sound like they've just about had enough, like the narrator in opener "I hope This Whole Thing Didn't Frighten You" who brings a new romantic partner to his old stomping grounds and is dismayed to find the same cast of characters indulging in the same vices.
But while the new record is an immediate improvement on Heaven's scattershot approach, it's got its own share of problems that keep it from reaching the band's previously set high watermark. The entire album is plagued by exactly the kind of production problems you'd expect from a guy who thought Stone Sour was worth a listen. It's hard to tell who's doing what in the mix more often than not, and Finn's new delivery gets bogged down in a swamp of chugging guitars far too often. It's a record designed, as are most modern rock releases, to sound decent enough on shitty car speakers and a sludgy mess on anything else. And while embracing the cock-rock tendencies it once held at arm's length works for the most part, there are still transitional pains. The clunky "On with the Business" sounds like a Liam Lynch parody of the old Hold Steady sound, with Finn rattling off lines like "Blood on the carpet/mud on the mattress/waking up to that American sadness" and "chemistry, currency, plastic and magic/come on everybody, let's get on with the business" with a seemingly straight face. And "Almost Everything" sounds like an honest-to-God Bon Jovi ballad; while Finn has a little fun playing around with the hair-metal tour-blues trope - "the bus that rolled up into Franklin at dawn and everything seemed super slow-mo/the Waffle House waitress that asked us if we were Pink Floyd" - the overall effect (which, again, is that of the Hold Steady playing a fucking Bon Jovi song) is jarring.
Luckily, Teeth Dreams rights the ship with nine-minute closer "Oaks," which manages to successfully merge the old Hold Steady (church organ, lyrics about being a little too old to buy drugs through a rolled-down car window) with the new (echo-y studio tricks that occasionally recall, well, Pink Floyd). More importantly, Finn ends the album looking forward instead of back; where the band's previous album-closing high mark - Stay Positive's "Slapped Actress" - touted the joys of recording the present and exploring the past ("we make our own movies"), "Oaks" finds Finn aimed toward the future: "We scratch. We scrape. We dream. And we hope." For fans who just want more Gideon, Holly, and John Berryman, that hope may ring hollow. But Teeth Dreams provides ample evidence that a Hold Steady that knows where it wants to go instead of worrying about where it's been has the potential to be a very good thing.
