{"id":41971,"date":"2010-05-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-06T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/heaven-is-whenever\/"},"modified":"2010-05-06T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-06T00:00:00","slug":"heaven-is-whenever","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/heaven-is-whenever\/","title":{"rendered":"Heaven Is Whenever"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Hold Steady feels your pain.\u00a0 No, really.\u00a0 They explicitly say so.\u00a0 “I\u00a0 know what you’re going through,” asserts singer Craig Finn on “Soft In The Center,” “I had to go through that, too.” And he does know… oh, he does.\u00a0 Sometimes, if you’re lucky – if the stars and FM transmitters align \u2013 your favorite band is more than just your favorite band.\u00a0 They speak not just to you but of you.\u00a0 Your life story’s no longer a patchwork of “ums” and awkward pauses, but a tapestry of beauty, insight and power chords.\u00a0 <\/span>Like cigarette ashes through an hourglass… so are the Bands of Our Lives.<\/p>\n

If you’re a Jersey kid with a motorcycle, an aching heart and an impassioned desire to escape the latter on the former, Bruce and the E Street Band are yours.\u00a0 If you spent high school clad in Che t-shirts and righteous fury, you’ve got Bad Religion.\u00a0 And if you’re a born rabble-rouser?\u00a0 Bright, ballsy, desperate, and degenerate?\u00a0 Not just liable but hell-bent to go further than you should and regret it less than you ought? \u00a0Your patrons saints have arrived.\u00a0 They’re a bunch of fortyish guys from Brooklyn.\u00a0 <\/span>Don’t worry.\u00a0 They know you better than you do.\u00a0 And your chicanery’s never sounded so magical. <\/p>\n

Rock ‘n roll, storytelling and bad behavior have shared a long and lusty menage a trois.\u00a0 In unskilled hands (or pleather pants), the results can be atrocious.\u00a0 But when they’re harmoniously fused – by musicians with solid skills, poetic hearts and public indecency convictions – what bursts forth can be pure, raucous joy.\u00a0 Warren Zevon was a master of the form.\u00a0 However, his gorgeously composed, bitterly funny ballads could rarely be called “real rip-snorters.”<\/p>\n

Seven years into their unintentional adventure (they didn’t plan to tour or record), The Hold Steady have produced five albums of rip-snorting, barn-burning, life-affirming rock.\u00a0 Lyricist Finn has also churned out enough dense, inventive verbiage to fill a novel – and a damned entertaining one at that.\u00a0 The Hold Steadiverse is a druggy, urban version of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.\u00a0 Characters have convoluted, intertwined back stories. Songs are jam-packed with references: other groups’ songs, other Hold Steady songs, characters’ prior exploits, Twin Cities topography, and a good percentage of the DEA’s controlled substances.\u00a0 And like the “clever kids” they name-check, the band’s done some growing up.<\/p>\n

Their breakout release, Boys And Girls In America<\/i>, was a manic mingle at a massive party.\u00a0 Two thousand eight\u2019s Stay Positive<\/i> was more like the harsh light of morning… waking up wedged in a stranger’s sectional and wondering what went down in between your brain hitting “pause” and your body following suit.\u00a0 Heaven Is Whenever<\/i>, the group’s fifth full-length, is their deepest, subtlest and most complex to date.\u00a0 If its predecessors were “party” and “hangover,” respectively, Heaven<\/i> is sitting at Denny’s in sweatpants, warming your hands on a cup of sludgy coffee and thinking about Life.<\/p>\n

The album’s reflective tone is immediately apparent. “The Sweet Part Of The City” is slow and summery.\u00a0 Slide guitar riffs swoop like dragonflies, a tambourine jangles sweetly, and Finn kicks around the past like a rock down a dusty road.\u00a0 “Barely Breathing” is a harder-edged kind of thoughtful.\u00a0 Its combination of weariness and bouncy, vaudevillian theatrics is grabby than catchy, though.\u00a0 Far more successful is the wistful “We Can Get Together.” The gentle piano, softly-strummed guitars and swelling background chorus make for knee-bucklingly romantic results. It’s a tribute to the power of love and the power of music (“heaven is whenever \/ we can get together \/ lock your bedroom door \/ and listen to your records”).\u00a0 It’s not quite swaying with thousands of sweaty, blissed-out kids in a field at sundown… but it’s close.<\/p>\n

While they do a damned fine job at “lushly pretty,” The Hold Steady’s real forte is “gleefully energetic.”\u00a0 And rest assured, Heaven<\/i> delivers the goodies.\u00a0 “Rock Problems” is the disc’s most anthemic track… a sly, rollicking gem with a shout-along chorus.\u00a0 “Soft In The Center” is a hard-charging, Rick Springfield-esque slice of 80’s earnestness.\u00a0 It also features an excellent blues-by-way-of-“November Rain” guitar solo.\u00a0 With dirty, stuttery guitars undulating over tight, snaky percussion, “The Smidge” is a grim, sexy paean to getting more pleasure than you’d ever thought possible out of things you never thought you’d do.<\/p>\n

All of those tracks manage to combine – improbably but skillfully – hands-flung-skyward enthusiasm and Advil-‘n-nosebleeds contemplation.\u00a0 But while they reflect the spirit of Heaven<\/i>, the best track absolutely clobbers you with it.\u00a0 “Our Whole Lives” is an ecstatic cataclysm.\u00a0 It’s Springsteenian rock at its biggest and most powerful.\u00a0 It’s joy and suffering, resignation and determination.\u00a0 It’s a bleacher-stomping, hard-hitting service at the church of American music.\u00a0 When the saxophone and hand-claps kick in, it’s utterly cliched… and it still makes you want to grin and shout, “Testify!”<\/p>\n

The album’s other two standout tracks are radically different (yet no less powerful) than “Our Whole Lives.”\u00a0 They’re a remarkably solemn contrast to the group’s riled-up, wild-eyed anthems.\u00a0 “The Weekenders”‘s heart is a literal one… a somber, insistent bass line like a far-from-calm pulse. The sharp bursts of guitar and backing chorus swirl and rage as the lyrics try to find footing to reflect on still-unsettled wreckage (“if you swear to keep it decent, then yeah I’ll come and see you \/ but it’s not going to be like in romantic comedies \/ in the end I bet no one learns a lesson”).<\/p>\n

The closing track, “A Slight Discomfort,” is a thorny one:\u00a0 in addition to being seven minutes plus, it’s also their most atypical, unapproachable song thus far.\u00a0 It’s a slow, bright-burning epic that shares more with Interpol’s “NYC” than Boys And Girls In America<\/i>.\u00a0 It’s only after repeated listening that the enormity begins to hit you.\u00a0 It starts out smoldering, echoic and Gypsy-tinged, then unfolds into a massive, shimmering soundscape.\u00a0 The drumwork’s like gunfire; the piano and violin bleak, minimalist and eerie. It has the visceral intensity of Portishead and precious little of customary Hold Steady positivity… that is, until the very end.<\/p>\n

The last few seconds of Heaven Is Whenever<\/i> are a single piano note, plinking tentatively… maybe even hopefully.\u00a0 It’s a question mark, a raised eyebrow, the barest hint of sun ushering a hard night into light. And after ten tracks which explore the gravity and grace of the drunk, bottomed-out and pantsless, it’s absolutely perfect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":30316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8202],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-41971","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-hold-steady","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41971"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}